"Anarchist's Progress" in The American Mercury (1927); § III : To Abolish Crime or to Monopolize It? http://www.mises.org/daily/2714
Context: Once, I remember, I ran across the case of a boy who had been sentenced to prison, a poor, scared little brat, who had intended something no worse than mischief, and it turned out to be a crime. The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one's conscience.
Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it — the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers — felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials. Clearly, too, the public did not regard them as criminals, but rather as upright and conscientious men.
The idea came to me then, vaguely but unmistakably, that if the primary intention of government was not to abolish crime but merely to monopolize crime, no better device could be found for doing it than the inculcation of precisely this frame of mind in the officials and in the public; for the effect of this was to exempt both from any allegiance to those sanctions of humanity or decency which anyone of either class, acting as an individual, would have felt himself bound to respect — nay, would have wished to respect. This idea was vague at the moment, as I say, and I did not work it out for some years, but I think I never quite lost track of it from that time.
Toll the Hounds (2008)
Context: When undeniable crime had been committed, justification was the act of a coward. And it was cowardice that permitted such crimes in the first place. No tyrant could thrive where every subject said no. The tyrant thrives when the first fucking fool salutes.
29 June 2005
Opposition to the proposed Reconciliation and Unity Commission
Post Reporter's Pulitzer Prize Is Withdrawn; Pulitzer Board Withdraws Post Reporter's Prize (19 April 1981)
Source: Life and Fate (1959), Chapter 2, page 5
“These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.”
Prologue
King Rat (1962)
Context: Changi was set like a pearl on the eastern tip of Singapore Island, iridescent under the bowl of tropical skies. It stood on a slight rise and around it was a belt of green, and farther off the green gave way to the blue-green seas and the seas to infinity of horizon.
Closer, Changi lost its beauty and became what it was — an obscene forbidding prison. Cellblocks surrounded by sun-baked courtyards surrounded by towering walls.
Inside the walls, inside the cellblocks, story on story, were cells for two thousand prisoners at capacity. Now, in the cells and in the passageways and in every nook and cranny lived some eight thousand men....
These men too were criminals. Their crime was vast. They had lost a war. And they had lived.
Tolstoy and His Message (New York: Funk and Wagnall's Company, 1904), p. 53 https://archive.org/stream/tolstoyhismessa00cros#page/52.
"Lady Chatterly's Trial (The Old Bailey, 20 October - 2 November 1960)", p. 409
Tynan Right and Left (1967)
Speech in the public baths of Caledonian Road, Islington, London (12 December 1900) against the Boer War, quoted in The Times (13 December 1900), p. 10.
1900s
Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 276 (U.S. 1952)
Judicial opinions
