criminals Quotes

“I have the keenest mind that has ever been turned to unlawful pursuits . . . ”

“JUDGE: Murder in the first degree—premeditated homicide—is the most serious charge in our criminal courts.”

“JUROR #4: We’re not here to go into the reasons why slums are breeding grounds for criminals. They are. I know it.”

“I was an imposter, one of the most wanted criminals on four continents, and at the moment I was doing my thing, putting a super hype on some nice people.”

“I was always aware that I was Frank Abagnale, Jr., that I was a check swindler and a faker, and if and when I was caught I wasn’t going to win any Oscars. I was going to jail.”

“I was speaking loudly, I realized, and I sounded almost angry, certainly righteous, but it was such a relief. I’d started with a lie—the cat box—and turned that into a surprising burst of pure truth, and I realized why criminals talked too much, because it feels so good to tell your story to a stranger.”

“I’ve been described by authorities and news reporters as one of this century’s cleverest bum-check passers, flimflam artists and crooks, a con man of Academy Award caliber. I was a swindler and and poseur of astonishing ability.”

″ ‘No, lady,’ The Misfit said while he was buttoning it up, ‘I found out the crime don’t matter. You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you’re going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.’ ”

“Great criminals bear about them a kind of predestination which makes them surmount all obstacles, which makes them escape all dangers, till the moment which a wearied Providence has marked as the rock for their impious fortunes.”

“To make up lost money he pulled tricks in the lot, a change artist of the first order. I saw him wish a well-to-do man Merry Christmas so volubly a five-spot in change for twenty was never missed.”

“To see a wretched criminal squirming in the dock, suffering the tortures of the damned… was to me an exquisite pleasure. Mind you, I took no pleasure in seeing an innocent man there.”

“So I was tired, but the tension of the last week was gone, the cold voice of the Dark Passenger was quiet, and I could be me again. Quirky, funny, happy-go-lucky, dead-inside Dexter. No longer Dexter with the knife, Dexter the Avenger. Not until next time.”

“I enjoy my work; sorry if that bothers you. Oh, very sorry, really. But there it is. And it’s not just any killing, of course. It has to be done the right way, at the right time, with the right partner—very complicated, but very necessary.”

″ ‘I do understand, Father,’ I said, and there was something in my voice, the Dark Passenger’s voice now, and the sound of it froze him. He lifted his head slowly to face me and what he saw in my eyes made him very still. ‘I understand perfectly,” I told him, moving very close to his face. The sweat on his cheeks turned to ice. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘I can’t help myself, either.’ ”

“I felt a lot better. I always did, after. Killing makes me feel good. It works the knots out of darling Dexter’s dark schemata. It’s a sweet release, a necessary letting go of all the little hydraulic valves inside. ”

“More hateful still the miscreant who seeks When caught, to make a virtue of a crime.”

“You had a very positive response. Tomorrow, of course, there’ll be two sessions, morning and afternoon, and I should imagine that you’ll be feeling a bit limp at the end of the day. But we have to be hard on you, you have to be cured.”

“Common criminals like this unsavoury crowd”--(that meant me, brothers, as well as the others, who were real prestoopnicks and treacherous with it)--“can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all. Full implementation in a year’s time. Punishment means nothing to them, you can see that. They enjoy their so-called punishment. They start murdering each other.”

“Recruiting brutal young roughs for the police. Proposing debilitating and will-sapping techniques of conditioning… Before we know where we are we shall have the full apparatus of totalitarianism.”

″‘Hang on,’ said Miguel. ‘What about Willy Wonka? Were there criminals in the chocolate factory?’

“As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

“Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.”

“All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. In fact, if the worst thing you have ever done is speed ten miles over the speed limit on the freeway, you have put yourself and others at more risk of harm than someone smoking marijuana in the privacy of his or her living room. Yet there are people in the United States serving life sentences for first-time drug offenses, something virtually unheard of anywhere else in the world.”

“Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal.”

“If you’d stop coddling criminals like Jazz, we’d get along better.”

“The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized.”

“A penal system must be conceived as a mechanism ... to administer illegalities differentially, not to eliminate them.”

“Set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself.”

“I’m not a criminal,” said Paddington, hotly. “I’m a bear!”

“The sneak thieves are here!”

“Again and again, due justice must be rendered the investigating commission. It had done everything possible not only to catch the criminals but also to explain everything they had done.”

“Welcome to the beautiful Sinclair family. No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure.”

“In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course.”

“Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me?”