Crime Quotes

We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay.

~ Natascha Kampusch

We mute the realization of malevolence- which is too threatening to bear - by turning offenders into victims themselves and by describing their behavior as the result of forces beyond their control.

~ Anna C. Salter

Oddly then, in our search for meaning, we often assign victims too much blame for their assaults, and offenders too little. Our inconsistencies do not seem to trouble us, but they are truly puzzling. After all, if the offender is not to blame for his behavior, why would the victim be, no matter what she did our didn't do? Our views make sense, however, if you think that we are trying to reassure ourselves that we are not helpless and, that, in any case, no one is out to get us.

~ Anna C. Salter

Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from ... It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps – even when they ask for help.

~ Natascha Kampusch

It was wrong. It was like arresting the gun for murder.

~ Ellery Queen

Could I please amend that suggestion? Could you not be there in the second darkest shadow one hour before midnight, to see who steps into the darkest shadow?

~ Terry Pratchett

Whoever has the sword will have the earth.

~ Oliver North

Steve had just met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Until now his engagement to Christine had never been a concern.

~ Stephen Douglass

When you get to Hell, I'll be sitting in the hot tub waiting.

~ Kristen Houghton

Science gave us forensics. Law gave us crime.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

You need a break, a complete rest, recharge your batteries.' Recharge your batteries. What the hell does that mean? Nelson prides himself on not needing batteries. He's an old-fashioned, wind-up model.

~ Elly Griffiths

HAVING NEVER taken a decent holiday before, I decided on a trip to Thailand, booked a flight and flew out the following week. Mate, I loved it. The friendly people, the food, the females!

~ Simon Palmer

I liked the idea of a person shedding their life, and someone else putting it on. -Oliver Harris on writing The Hollow Man for Crime Time online magazine

~ Oliver Harris

It didn't take a professional to end a life- Riley

~ Alana Henry

I noticed some scratch marks and faded blood stains high up on a wall. “What happened there?”“An inmate must have tried to escape. I saw a guy use two suction devices like the ones used to carry glass sheets to help lever himself up. He reached half way before being spotted by a blue shirt.”“What happened to him?”“The blue shirt called a guard. He was ordered to come down, but didn’t. They shot him in the leg, he fell and later in the cell, he removed a blade from a disposable razor, slashed his left wrist then wrote a suicide note on the wall with his right hand – in his own blood. Suicide is really common in here and nobody bats an eyelid.

~ Simon Palmer

Behind every person who’s committed an unimaginable crime is an adult who committed unimaginable violence against them as a child. All of them, as if it was plotted that way. Violence begets violence, and that violence begets even more violence.

~ Gong Jiyoung

In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.

~ Michel Foucault

Murder, other than in the most strict forensic sense, is never soluble. That dark human clot can never melt into a lucid, clear suspension. Our detective fiction tells us otherwise: everything is just neat and cold ballistics. Provide a murderer, a motive and a means, and you have solved the crime. Using this method, the solution to the Second World War is as follows: Hitler. The German economy. Tanks. Thus, for convenience, we reduce the complex events.

~ Alan Moore

She’ll find you. Her need to know you will eventually consume her.

~ Stephen Douglass

Never patronize your readers. That means don't talk down to them.

~ Tom Greer

He didn't know the right people. That's all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.

~ Raymond Chandler

...the arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.

~ J.g. Ballard

The woman with the cat complex is named Mrs. Alice Plesher, but she doesn't reveal her first name to him and Sai only finds out by accident, later. Mrs. Plesher calls the paper and is put through to Sai. He has no idea why although he could guess the new guy gets all of the reporter-on-the-beat drudgery assignments until proven worthy. Alice speaks haltingly as if hardened by age and her voice reveals a rasp. Sai pictures her in a long house dress from the fifties, wide pink and white stripes fading with age---a smock of beige over the dress, a multitude of cats clinging to the fabric like stick-ons.

~ Justin Bog

I can’t wait for the day when we’ll never have to say ‘goodbye’ to each other again.

~ Stephen Douglass

I write that crime is an unlawful act of violence that can be committed by anyone, and that punishment is the consequence designed for criminals who don't have the economic means to cover it up. Throughout history, men of wealth and power have been exempt from facing the consequences of their evil deeds. Crime, therefore, can be defined as an offense committed by an individual of inferior status in society. Punishment is a consequence forced on the perpetrator of the crime only if he occupies one of the lower steps of the social ladder

~ Mahbod Seraji

In musing on all that occurred in the course of the several years of harassment the error I decided I made, and others frequently make, is to assume that we are all academics trying to sort out intellectual issues. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a political organization composed primarily of individuals who have been accused of child sexual abuse and those who support and defend them, sometimes for considerable sums.Such people are not going to be swayed by the research. They start with a fixed point of view-the need to deflect threat. That threat comes in the form of public exposure, loss of income, monetary penalties, or even in some cases incarceration. I heard a colleague say recently, in referring to the 30 or so studies that document the existence of recovered memory, “You get to the point where you wonder when is it going to be enough.” It is never going to be enough if the point is not searching for the truth but protecting a particular point of view.Confessions of a Whistle-Blower: Lessons Anna C. Salter. Ethics & Behavior, Volume 8, Issue 2 June 1998

~ Anna C. Salter

A quick butchers shows up Old Bill three-handed, also a particularly nasty female grass–-and if looks were acid baths the two she collects from us would reduce her to gristle quicker than Mrs. Durand-Deacon.

~ Derek Raymond

The criminal mind is perverted and convoluted but almost invariably unimaginative,'he said as Molly came out in a fluster

~ M.r.c. Kasasian

Really, some cases shouldn’t even smell the court room. Screw Habaeus Corpus, lock up the criminal and have the keys thrown away.

~ S.a. David

From this height the sleeping city seems like a child's construction, a model which has refused to be constrained by imagination. The volcanic plug might be black Plasticine, the castle balanced solidly atop it a skewed rendition of crenellated building bricks. The orange street lamps are crumpled toffee-wrappers glued to lollipop sticks.

~ Ian Rankin

Sometimes the guilty one is not the person who has committed the crime, but the person who has created the possibility for it to be committed.

~ Cristiane Serruya

We assassinate. We don't accessorize. But I understand how it is possible to confuse the two.

~ Angelika Rust

It's all very well to talk like that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “We, you say? What do you think I can do about it? I can't even walk without help. How can you and I set about preventing a murder? You're about a hundred and I'm a broken-up old crock.

~ Agatha Christie

I rushed to the bathroom for every corner of the hospital was suffocating. I got hold of acid-bottle, which was meant for toilet cleaning. As I took it into my hands, I realized I had more filth inside me than a toilet. A toilet could be cleaned by an acid bottle, or a toilet cleaner, but there was no such product that could cleanse a criminal from inside. I felt so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t even look into the eyes of my reflection in the mirror on the wall.

~ Mehek Bassi

Young girls frequently report that their early sexual experiences were coerced. In a study in South Africa, 30 percent of girls report that their first sexual intercourse was forced. In rural Malawi, 55 percent of adolescent girls surveyed report that they were often forced to have sex.

~ Njovana Watts

Even in prosperous times the living robbed the dead

~ Jocelyn Murray

You can take care of everything except chance. Chance can kill you.

~ Charles Williams

None of these apparent sightings interested Hawksmoor, since it was quite usual for members of the public to come forward with such accounts and to describe unreal figures who took on the adventitious shape already suggested by newspaper accounts. There were even occasions when a number of people would report sightings of the same person, as if a group of hallucinations might create their own object which then seemed to hover for a while in the streets of London. And Hawksmoor knew that if he held a reconstruction of the crime by the church, yet more people would come forward with their own versions of time and event; the actual killing then became blurred and even inconsequential, a flat field against which others painted their own fantasies of murderer and victim.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Objects about these ruined Lanes, all of them lamentable Instances of Vengeance. And it is not strange (as some think) how they will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre. Theft, Whoredom and Homicide peep out of the very Windows of their Souls; Lying, Perjury, Fraud, Impudence and Misery are stamped upon their very Countenances as now they walk within the Shaddowe of my Church.

~ Peter Ackroyd

Threats from the street may be potentially lethal, but the threat from the enemy within is a far worse hazard to a law officers health and wellbeing.

~ Steve Neal