"I came from a real tough neighborhood. Once a guy pulled a knife on me. I knew he wasn't a professional, the knife had butter on it."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"Once I pulled a job, I was so stupid. I picked a guy's pocket on an airplane and made a run for it."
— Rodney Dangerfield

"Criminals should be punished, not fed pastries."
— Lemony Snicket (The Blank Book)

"Good. Illegal is always faster. (Butler, Artemis Fowl's bodygaurd)"
— Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl: The Opal Deception)

"Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have."
— John Grisham (The Rainmaker)

"There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined."
— Albert Camus

"To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace"
— Malcolm X

""Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I'll thank you not to use that language around me.""
— Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark)

"(...) when a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw."
— Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom: Autobiography of Nelson Mandela)

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."
— G.K. Chesterton (The Blue Cross)

"Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men."
— George Bernard Shaw

"It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"“If you think your boss is stupid, remember: you wouldn’t have a job if he was any smarter.”
"
— John Gotti

"We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody threw the girl off the bridge."
— John D. MacDonald (Darker Than Amber)

"Feeling - what authentic human fun!"
— Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark)

"I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating."
— Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark)

"A method of procuring sensations? Do you think then, that a man who has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again? Don't tell me that." says Dorian.
"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," says Lord Henry"
— Oscar Wilde

"The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime, the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive."
— Arthur Conan Doyle

"In my life long study of human beings, I have found that no matter how hard they try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workday lives of meaningless toin and suffering."
— Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark)

"Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist."
— Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark)

"Rorschach's journal. October 12th, 1985.... This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'save us!'... and I'll look down, and whisper, 'no.'"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"When the gap between the world of the city and the world my grandfather had presented to me as right and good became too wide and depressing to tolerate, I'd turn to my other great love, which was pulp adventure fiction. Despite the fact that [he] would have had nothing but scorn and loathing for all of those violent and garish magazines, there was a sort of prevailing morality in them that I'm sure he would have responded to. The world of Doc Savage and The Shadow was one of absolute values, where what was good was never in the slightest doubt and where what was evil inevitably suffered some fitting punishment. The notion of good and justice espoused by Lamont Cranston with his slouch hat and blazing automatics seemed a long way from that of the fierce and taciturn old man I remembered sitting up alone into the Montana night with no company save his bible, but I can't help feeling that if the two had ever met they'd have found something to talk about. For my part, all those brilliant and resourceful sleuths and heroes offered a glimpse of a perfect world where morality worked the way it was meant to. Nobody in Doc Savage's world ever killed themselves except thwarted kamikaze assassins or enemy spies with cyanide capsules. Which world would you rather live in, if you had the choice?"
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime."
— Aristotle

"Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination... It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood"
— Oscar Wilde

"Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse."
— Thomas More (Utopia)

"For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if only for one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured--disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui--in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable. And all the while a meter is running inside and there is no hand that can reach in there and shut it off."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them."
— Machado de Assis (The Devil's Church and Other Stories)

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
— James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss)

"Afraid? I can dodge folly without backing into fear."
— Rex Stout (The Doorbell Rang)

"Downtown, a dress for Meg- I do it every time I kill a man."
— James Ellroy

"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (Arthur Conan Doyle Collection: The Hound of the Baskervilles/The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes/The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire)

"There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws."
— Ayn Rand

"There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again."
— Dinesh D'Souza (Letters To A Young Conservative)

"When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals."
— Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)

"You can lie through your teeth, but your teeth don't lie"
— Charles Bosworth Jr.

"I want to kill this degenerate bastard brother of yours. But I am not selfish, I do not want to deprive you of that honor."
— William Balsamo (Crime Incorporated: The Inside Story of the Mafia's First 100 Years)

"The world was getting dangerously crowded with crazy people."
— John Dunning (The Bookman's Wake)

"All objects in the universe are unique. No two things that happen by chance ever happen in exactly the same way. No two things are ever constructed or manufactured in exactly the same way. No two things wear in exactly the same way. No two things ever break in exactly the same way. "
— Joe Nickell & John F. Fischer

"The main rub was the lack of RnR and I burned out. Three years and three stripes later, I ejected from the MP Corps, vowing I'd never do police or criminal investigative work again. Instead, I returned home when I should've learned better. "
— Ed Lynskey (Pelham Fell Here)

"Obwohl diese afrikanischen Militärbanden oft nicht größer oder mächtiger sind als die organisierten kriminellen Banden in Asien oder Osteuropa, wird über ihre Aktivitäten in den Medien - sogar in den westlichen Medien - unter der Rubrik Politik (Geschehen aus aller Welt) respektvoll berichtet, statt unter der Rubrik Verbrechen."
— J.M. Coetzee (Tagebuch eines schlimmen Jahres)

"It was crime at its purest, in which empathy, that most fundamental aspect of human morality, evaporated and another being became only a target for untamed fantasy."
— Scott Turow (Limitations)

"Love great first lines and paragraphs. From The Yiddish Policemen's Union:
Nine months Landsman's been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker. "
— Michael Chabon

"Vice may triumph for a time, crime may flaunt its victories in the face of honest toilers, but in the end the law will follow the wrong-doer to a bitter fate, and dishonor and punishment will be the portion of those who sin."
— Allan Pinkerton

"A society gets the criminals it deserves."
— Val MacDermid (Killing The Shadows)

"Some actions are even baser than the people who commit them."
— Machado de Assis