“Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase, but never do away with, crime.”

— Emma Goldman

Anarchism, What it Really Stands For (1910)
Anarchism, What it Really Stands For (1910)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic, political, social, and moral, …" by Emma Goldman?

Emma Goldman 109

anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and sp… 1868–1940

Related quotes

“I do not mean to deny the biologic, physiologic, or psychologic factors in creating crime; but there is hardly an advanced criminologist who will not concede that the social and economic influences are the most relentless, the most poisonous germs of crime.”

Emma Goldman book Anarchism and Other Essays

Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure

“Crime is so out of control. Criminals have no fear of punishment. Prisons are overcrowded so they know they will not be imprisoned long. This breeds more crime, in an escalating cyclic pattern.”

Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) American army soldier, security guard, terrorist

1990s, Letter to the Union-Sun & Journal (1992)

“Do not dwell upon the sins and mistakes of yesterday so exclusively as to have no energy and mind left for living rightly today, and do not think that the sins of yesterday can prevent you from living purely today.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

Source: Byways of Blessedness

“There is, in fact, but one great crime in the universe, and most of the instances of terrestrial wrong-doing are instances of this crime. It is the crime of exploitation—the considering by some beings of themselves as ends, and of others as their means—the refusal to recognize the equal, or the approximately equal, rights of all to life and its legitimate rewards—the crime of acting toward others as one would that others would not act toward him. For millions of years, almost ever since life began, this crime has been committed, in every nook and quarter of the inhabited globe.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings", pp. 276–277
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

“So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The Second Part, Chapter 27, p. 151
Leviathan (1651)

“Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude. In our kind of society - with its absence of pre-capitalist traditions - the only way to do away with training devices is to change the laws and their enforcement so that, unlike the current income tax, they do not depend upon individual integrity. Another way is to pass only laws that result from great social movements with concomitant changes in moral codes, but there is no such movement underway in any area of American society today.”

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) American sociologist

"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

“There can be no question of political status for someone who is serving a sentence for crime. Crime is crime is crime. It is not political. To give concessions on political status would put many people in jeopardy.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Press conference in Saudi Arabia (21 April 1981), quoted in The Times (22 April 1981) p. 1, regarding the 1981 Irish hunger strike.
First term as Prime Minister

“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”

H. G. Wells book A Modern Utopia

Source: A Modern Utopia (1905), Ch. 5, sect. 2

“If a father commands a son to commit a crime so terrible that the son can't do it and live with himself, then is it betrayal for the son to disobey his father?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)

“I knew that Jack needed a lot of help, and what he really needed was somebody who could spend a prodigious amount of time with him, every night, see him, live with him, live with him the way someone in A. A. lives with a drunk. … I wasn't doing that. So when the crime occurred — because I'd just been hoping things would work out all right — when the crime occurred, I knew that I had a responsibility on that one.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

On his role in the parole of Jack Abbott, during which Abbot killed a man.
Interview for French TV (1998)

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Emma Goldman 109

Related quotes

Related topics