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Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.
-Cyril Connolly
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All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.
-Marquis De Sade
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It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.
-Marquis De Sade
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One crime is everything, two is nothing.
-Madame Dorothe Deluzy
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The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.
-Democritus
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I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don't trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
-Charles Dickens
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Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
-E. L. Doctorow
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Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home.
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891
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Successful crimes alone are justified.
-John Dryden
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There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.
-Emile Durkheim
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Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological -- resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
-Barbara Ehrenreich
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We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
-Havelock Ellis
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As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
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One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.
-Giovanni Falcone
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Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.
-Barry J. Farber
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Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.
-George Farquhar
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The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
-Michel Foucault
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The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
-John Kenneth Galbraith
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Gamesters and highwaymen are generally very good to their whores, but they are very devils to their wives.
-John Gay
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Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.
-Jean Genet
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Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.
-Jean Genet
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How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.
-Henry George
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Books about Crime
