Quotes about crime (1533 quotes, page 14)

“What force, precisely, is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)
Context: The prison is overcrowded, the calendars full, the judges busy, the lawyers ambitious, and the cops zealous. What does it matter if someone gets trapped here for a year or two, gets ruined here, goes mad here, commits murder or suicide here? It's too bad, but that's the way the cookie crumbles sometimes. I do not claim that everyone in prison here is innocent, but I do claim that the law, as it operates, is guilty, and that the prisoners, therefore, are all unjustly imprisoned. Is it conceivable, after all, that any middle-class white boy -- or, indeed, almost any white boy -- would have been arrested on so grave a charge as murder, with such flimsy substantiation, and forced to spend, as of this writing, three years in prison? What force, precisely, is operating when a prisoner is advised, requested, ordered, intimidated, or forced, to confess to a crime he has not committed, and promised a lighter sentence for so perjuring and debasing himself? Does the law exist for the purpose of furthering the ambitions of those who have sworn to uphold the law, or is it seriously to be considered as a moral, unifying force, the health and strength of a nation?

Health , Law

“At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 51
Context: At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.
The good is the only source of the sacred. There is nothing sacred except the good and what pertains to it.

Suffering , Evil , Heart

“He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. For his crime he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoid the usual misfortunes of the present life.”
Est quidem vera lex recta ratio naturae congruens, diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna, quae vocet ad officium iubendo, vetando a fraude deterreat; quae tamen neque probos frustra iubet aut vetat nec improbos iubendo aut vetando movet. Huic legi nec obrogari fas est neque derogari ex hac aliquid licet neque tota abrogari potest, nec vero aut per senatum aut per populum solvi hac lege possumus, neque est quaerendus explanator aut interpres eius alius, nec erit alia lex Romae, alia Athenis, alia nunc, alia posthac, sed et omnes gentes et omni tempore una lex et sempiterna et immutabilis continebit, unusque erit communis quasi magister et imperator omnium deus, ille legis huius inventor, disceptator, lator; cui qui non parebit, ipse se fugiet ac naturam hominis aspernatus hoc ipso luet maximas poenas, etiamsi cetera supplicia, quae putantur, effugerit.

Marcus Tullius Cicero book De Legibus

De Re Publica [Of The Republic], Book III Section 22; as translated by Francis Barham
Variant translations:
True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. And there will not be different laws at Rome and at Athens, or different laws now and in the future, but one eternal and unchangeable law will be valid for all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is, God, over us all, for he is the author of this law, its promulgator, and its enforcing judge. Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly considered punishment.
As translated by Clinton W. Keyes (1928)
Context: There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. Whether it enjoins or forbids, the good respect its injunctions, and the wicked treat them with indifference. This law cannot be contradicted by any other law, and is not liable either to derogation or abrogation. Neither the senate nor the people can give us any dispensation for not obeying this universal law of justice. It needs no other expositor and interpreter than our own conscience. It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing to–day and another to–morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must for ever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author,—its promulgator,—its enforcer. He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man. For his crime he must endure the severest penalties hereafter, even if he avoid the usual misfortunes of the present life.

Life , Penalty , Nature

“This limitation of the field of vision of criminology together with the absence of an exact and permanent definition of the concept of crime is one of the chief characteristics of our culture.”

P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) Russian esotericist

Source: A New Model of the Universe (1932), p. 37-38; "Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity"' has also been translated as "Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes" in a 1984 edition.
Context: Existing criminology is insufficient to isolate barbarism. It is insufficient because the idea of "crime" in existing criminology is artificial, for what is called crime is really an infringement of "existing laws", whereas "laws" are very often a manifestation of barbarism and violence. Such are the prohibiting laws of different kinds which abound in modern life. The number of these laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. On the other hand, unquestionable crimes escape the field of vision of criminology, either because they have not recognized the form of crime or because they surpass a certain scale. In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity.
This limitation of the field of vision of criminology together with the absence of an exact and permanent definition of the concept of crime is one of the chief characteristics of our culture.

“Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties.”

William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer

The Place Of Dead Roads‎ (1983), p. 155
Context: Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. Those individuals who cannot or will not mind their business cling to the victimless-crime concept, equating drug use and private sexual behavior with robbery and murder. If the right to mind one's own business is recognized, the whole shit disposition is untenable and Hell hath no vociferous fury than an endangered parasite.

Books , Penalty

“The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit.”

Lysander Spooner book No Treason

Source: No Treason (1867–1870), No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority, p. 12–13
Context: It is true that the theory of our Constitution is, that all taxes are paid voluntarily; that our government is a mutual insurance company, voluntarily entered into by the people with each other; that each man makes a free and purely voluntary contract with all others who are parties to the Constitution, to pay so much money for so much protection, the same as he does with any other insurance company; and that he is just as free not to be protected, and not to pay any tax, as he is to pay a tax, and be protected.But this theory of our government is wholly different from the practical fact. The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.The highwayman takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber. He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a "protector," and that he takes men's money against their will, merely to enable him to "protect" those infatuated travellers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these. Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful "sovereign," on account of the "protection" he affords you. He does not keep "protecting" you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villainies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.The proceedings of those robbers and murderers, who call themselves "the government," are directly the opposite of these of the single highwayman.In the first place, they do not, like him, make themselves individually known; or, consequently, take upon themselves personally the responsibility of their acts. On the contrary, they secretly (by secret ballot) designate some one of their number to commit the robbery in their behalf, while they keep themselves practically concealed.

Money

“It may well be said that Hitler's final crime was against the land he had ruled. He was a mad messiah who started the war without cause and prolonged it without reason. If he could not rule he cared not what happened to Germany. As Fritzsche has told us from the stand, Hitler tried to use the defeat of Germany for the self-destruction of the German people. He continued to fight when he knew it could not be won, and continuance meant only ruin… Hitler ordered everyone else to fight to the last and then retreated into death by his own hand. But he left life as he lived it, a deceiver; he left the official report that he had died in battle. This was the man whom these defendants exalted to a Fuhrer. It was they who conspired to get him absolute authority over all of Germany. And in the end he and the system they created for him brought the ruin of them all.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Summation for the Prosecution, July 26, 1946
Quotes from the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946)

Life , Death , War , People

“Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?”

Leó Szilárd (1898–1964) Physicist and biologist

"President Truman Did Not Understand" http://www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/usnews.html in U.S. News & World Report (15 August 1960)
Variant: If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.
As quoted in The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (1996) by Dennis Wainstock, p. 122
Context: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?
But, again, don't misunderstand me. The only conclusion we can draw is that governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.

Death , War

“Like men condemn'd to thunder-bolts,
Who, ere the blow, become mere dolts;
Or fools besotted with their crimes,
That know not how to shift betimes,
And neither have the hearts to stay,
Nor wit enough to run away.”

Samuel Butler (poet) Hudibras

Hudibras, Part III (1678)
Context: We idly sit, like stupid blockheads,
Our hands committed to our pockets,
And nothing but our tongues at large,
To get the wretches a discharge:
Like men condemn'd to thunder-bolts,
Who, ere the blow, become mere dolts;
Or fools besotted with their crimes,
That know not how to shift betimes,
And neither have the hearts to stay,
Nor wit enough to run away.

Men , Fools , Heart

“He told of all the spying that went on, the denunciations to the Gestapo, the sudden disappearances of innocent people, of the daily new edicts and restrictions, of confiscations that were nothing but robberies, arrests, and executions; how every crime committed was draped in the mantilla of legality.”

Walter Slezak (1902–1983) actor

On reading letters his father had written him during the years of World War II, after his father's death, p. 226
What Time's the Next Swan? (1962)
Context: After America had entered the war in December 1941 all postal service with Germany and Austria was stopped. But Papa had faithfully kept on writing to me, a ten-page letter nearly every week. They were never mailed and I found them, neatly bundled, sealed and addressed to me. … And now, on the plane, winging back home, I began to read his letters. They are remarkable documents. It's the whole war, as seen from the other side, through the eyes of a man who detested the fascist system, who hated the Nazis with a white fury. In the midst of the astonishing German victories in the early part of the war he was firmly convinced that Hitler MUST and WOULD lose. He dreaded communism, and all his predictions have come true. He told of all the spying that went on, the denunciations to the Gestapo, the sudden disappearances of innocent people, of the daily new edicts and restrictions, of confiscations that were nothing but robberies, arrests, and executions; how every crime committed was draped in the mantilla of legality.
His great perception, intelligence, decency, his wonderful humanity, his love of music and above all his worshipful adoration for his Elsa — through every page they shimmered with luminescent radiance.

People

“In short, every virtue has been a crime, and every crime a virtue. The church has burned honesty and rewarded hypocrisy. And all this, because it was commanded by a book — a book that men had been taught implicitly to believe, long before they knew one word that was in it. They had been taught that to doubt the truth of this book — to examine it, even — was a crime of such enormity that it could not be forgiven, either in this world or in the next.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Heretics and Heresies (1874)
Context: Nature never prompted a loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny and hypocrisy. Under the impression that the infinite ruler and creator of the universe had commanded the destruction of heretics and infidels, the church perpetrated all these crimes:
Men and women have been burned for thinking there is but one God; that there was none; that the Holy Ghost is younger than God; that God was somewhat older than his son; for insisting that good works will save a man without faith; that faith will do without good works; for declaring that a sweet babe will not be burned eternally, because its parents failed to have its head wet by a priest; for speaking of God as though he had a nose; for denying that Christ was his own father; for contending that three persons, rightly added together, make more than one; for believing in purgatory; for denying the reality of hell; for pretending that priests can forgive sins; for preaching that God is an essence; for denying that witches rode through the air on sticks; for doubting the total depravity of the human heart; for laughing at irresistible grace, predestination and particular redemption; for denying that good bread could be made of the body of a dead man; for pretending that the pope was not managing this world for God, and in the place of God; for disputing the efficacy of a vicarious atonement; for thinking the Virgin Mary was born like other people; for thinking that a man's rib was hardly sufficient to make a good-sized woman; for denying that God used his finger for a pen; for asserting that prayers are not answered, that diseases are not sent to punish unbelief; for denying the authority of the Bible; for having a Bible in their possession; for attending mass, and for refusing to attend; for wearing a surplice; for carrying a cross, and for refusing; for being a Catholic, and for being a Protestant; for being an Episcopalian, a Presbyterian, a Baptist, and for being a Quaker. In short, every virtue has been a crime, and every crime a virtue. The church has burned honesty and rewarded hypocrisy. And all this, because it was commanded by a book — a book that men had been taught implicitly to believe, long before they knew one word that was in it. They had been taught that to doubt the truth of this book — to examine it, even — was a crime of such enormity that it could not be forgiven, either in this world or in the next.

Men , Truth , Books , World

“The success is various, as the faculties and conditions which God has given are various; but the spectre which haunted the conscience is gone. Our failures are errors, not crimes — nature's discipline with which God teaches us; and as little violations of His law, or rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early blunders, or even ultimate and entire failures, are laying store of guilt on him.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: Finally rises philosophy, which, after a few monstrous efforts from Calvin to Leibnitz to reconcile contradictions and form a theodice, comes out boldly in Spinozism to declare the impossibility of the existence of a power antagonistic to God; and defining the perfection of man's nature, as the condition under which it has fullest action and freest enjoyment of all its powers, sets this as a moral ideal hefore us, toward which we shall train our moral efforts as the artist trains his artistic efforts towards his ideal. The success is various, as the faculties and conditions which God has given are various; but the spectre which haunted the conscience is gone. Our failures are errors, not crimes — nature's discipline with which God teaches us; and as little violations of His law, or rendering us guilty in His eyes, as the artist's early blunders, or even ultimate and entire failures, are laying store of guilt on him.

God , Law , Error , Failure

“Nature never prompted a loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Heretics and Heresies (1874)
Context: Nature never prompted a loving mother to throw her child into the Ganges. Nature never prompted men to exterminate each other for a difference of opinion concerning the baptism of infants. These crimes have been produced by religions filled with all that is illogical, cruel and hideous. These religions were produced for the most part by ignorance, tyranny and hypocrisy. Under the impression that the infinite ruler and creator of the universe had commanded the destruction of heretics and infidels, the church perpetrated all these crimes:
Men and women have been burned for thinking there is but one God; that there was none; that the Holy Ghost is younger than God; that God was somewhat older than his son; for insisting that good works will save a man without faith; that faith will do without good works; for declaring that a sweet babe will not be burned eternally, because its parents failed to have its head wet by a priest; for speaking of God as though he had a nose; for denying that Christ was his own father; for contending that three persons, rightly added together, make more than one; for believing in purgatory; for denying the reality of hell; for pretending that priests can forgive sins; for preaching that God is an essence; for denying that witches rode through the air on sticks; for doubting the total depravity of the human heart; for laughing at irresistible grace, predestination and particular redemption; for denying that good bread could be made of the body of a dead man; for pretending that the pope was not managing this world for God, and in the place of God; for disputing the efficacy of a vicarious atonement; for thinking the Virgin Mary was born like other people; for thinking that a man's rib was hardly sufficient to make a good-sized woman; for denying that God used his finger for a pen; for asserting that prayers are not answered, that diseases are not sent to punish unbelief; for denying the authority of the Bible; for having a Bible in their possession; for attending mass, and for refusing to attend; for wearing a surplice; for carrying a cross, and for refusing; for being a Catholic, and for being a Protestant; for being an Episcopalian, a Presbyterian, a Baptist, and for being a Quaker. In short, every virtue has been a crime, and every crime a virtue. The church has burned honesty and rewarded hypocrisy. And all this, because it was commanded by a book — a book that men had been taught implicitly to believe, long before they knew one word that was in it. They had been taught that to doubt the truth of this book — to examine it, even — was a crime of such enormity that it could not be forgiven, either in this world or in the next.

Love , Men , Religion , Nature

“Then some one spake: "Behold! it was a crime
Of sense avenged by sense that wore with time."
Another said: "The crime of sense became
The crime of malice, and is equal blame."
And one: "He had not wholly quench'd his power;
A little grain of conscience made him sour."
At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?"
To which an answer peal'd from that high land,
But in a tongue no man could understand;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) British poet laureate

"The Vision of Sin", sec. 5 (1842)

God , Hope , Understanding , Sense

“To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life, and that, if he expresses them in public, he has only himself to blame if they who disagree with him should rise and put him to death, is to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of the laws, and to justify and extenuate all crimes.”

William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) American romantic poet and journalist

Editorial written in remembrance of Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor and abolitionist, who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois during their attack on his warehouse to destroy his press and abolitionist materials.

Context: The right to discuss freely and openly, by speech, by the pen, by the press, all political questions, and to examine and animadvert upon all political institutions, is a right so clear and certain, so interwoven with our other liberties, so necessary, in fact to their existence, that without it we must fall at once into depression or anarchy. To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life, and that, if he expresses them in public, he has only himself to blame if they who disagree with him should rise and put him to death, is to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of the laws, and to justify and extenuate all crimes.

Life , Death , Law

“The dishonesty and speciousness of the feminist rape analysis are demonstrated by its failure to explore, or even mention, man-on-man sex crimes.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 33
Context: The dishonesty and speciousness of the feminist rape analysis are demonstrated by its failure to explore, or even mention, man-on-man sex crimes. If rape were really just a process of intimidation of women by men, why do men rape and kill other men? The deceptively demure persona of the soft-spoken, homosexual serial-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer, like that of the handsome, charming Ted Bundy, should warn everyone that we still live in a sexual jungle.

Sex , Failure

“Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him. All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler's shroud. It was these dead men whom these living chose to be their partners in this great conspiratorial brotherhood, and the crimes that they did together they must pay for one by one.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Summation for the Prosecution, July 26, 1946
Quotes from the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946)
Context: These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. If we combine only the stories of the front bench, this is the ridiculous composite picture of Hitler's Government that emerges. It was composed of:
A No. 2 man who knew nothing of the excesses of the Gestapo which he created, and never suspected the Jewish extermination programme although he was the signer of over a score of decrees which instituted the persecution of that race;
A No. 3 man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy;
A Foreign Minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy;
A Field-Marshal who issued orders to the armed forces but had no idea of the results they would have in practice …
… This may seem like a fantastic exaggeration, but this is what you would actually be obliged to conclude if you were to acquit these defendants.
They do protest too much. They deny knowing what was common knowledge. They deny knowing plans and programmes that were as public as Mein Kampf and the Party programme. They deny even knowing the contents of documents which they received and acted upon. … The defendants have been unanimous, when pressed, in shifting the blame on other men, sometimes on one and sometimes on another. But the names they have repeatedly picked are Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Bormann. All of these are dead or missing. No matter how hard we have pressed the defendants on the stand, they have never pointed the finger at a living man as guilty. It is a temptation to ponder the wondrous workings of a fate which has left only the guilty dead and only the innocent alive. It is almost too remarkable.
The chief villain on whom blame is placed — some of the defendants vie with each other in producing appropriate epithets — is Hitler. He is the man at whom nearly every defendant has pointed an accusing finger.
I shall not dissent from this consensus, nor do I deny that all these dead and missing men shared the guilt. In crimes so reprehensible that degrees of guilt have lost their significance they may have played the most evil parts. But their guilt cannot exculpate the defendants. Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him. All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler's shroud. It was these dead men whom these living chose to be their partners in this great conspiratorial brotherhood, and the crimes that they did together they must pay for one by one.

Men , Dead

“Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries — but it is a force stronger than crime.”

Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988) American science fiction author

This I Believe (1952)
Context: Decency is not news; it is buried in the obituaries — but it is a force stronger than crime.
I believe in the patient gallantry of nurses... in the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that goes on quietly in almost every home in the land.

“When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2015, Presidential Bid Announcement (June 16, 2015)
Context: When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They're sending us not the right people. It's coming from more than Mexico. It's coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably – probably – from the Middle East. But we don't know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don't know what's happening. And it's got to stop and it's got to stop fast.

People , Problem

“The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Regarding the Torture of Others (2004)
Context: The charges against most of the people detained in the prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan being nonexistent — the Red Cross reports that 70 to 90 percent of those being held seem to have committed no crime other than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught up in some sweep of "suspects" — the principal justification for holding them is "interrogation." Interrogation about what? About anything. Whatever the detainee might know. If interrogation is the point of detaining prisoners indefinitely, then physical coercion, humiliation and torture become inevitable.
Remember: we are not talking about that rarest of cases, the "ticking time bomb" situation, which is sometimes used as a limiting case that justifies torture of prisoners who have knowledge of an imminent attack. This is general or nonspecific information-gathering, authorized by American military and civilian administrators to learn more of a shadowy empire of evildoers about whom Americans know virtually nothing, in countries about which they are singularly ignorant: in principle, any information at all might be useful. An interrogation that produced no information (whatever information might consist of) would count as a failure.

People , Time

“Satan sought in many ways to scandalize the church. He sometimes assumed the appearance of a priest and committed crimes.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Thanksgiving Sermon (1897)
Context: It taught the awful doctrine of witchcraft. It filled the darkness with demons—the air with devils, and the world with grief and shame. It charged men, women and children with being in league with Satan to injure their fellows. Old women were convicted for causing storms at sea—for preventing rain and for bringing frost. Girls were convicted for having changed themselves into wolves, snakes and toads. These witches were burned for causing diseases—for selling their souls and for souring beer. All these things were done with the aid of the Devil who sought to persecute the faithful, the lambs of God. Satan sought in many ways to scandalize the church. He sometimes assumed the appearance of a priest and committed crimes.

Way , Appearance

“All these people try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

§ IV
1910s, At the Feet of the Master (1911)
Context: Then as to cruelty. This is of two kinds, intentional and unintentional. Intentional cruelty is purposely to give pain to another living being; and that is the greatest of all sins — the work of a devil rather than a man. You would say that no man could do such a thing; but men have done it often, and are daily doing it now. The inquisitors did it; many religious people did it in the name of their religion. Vivisectors do it; many schoolmasters do it habitually. All these people try to excuse their brutality by saying that it is the custom; but a crime does not cease to be a crime because many commit it. Karma takes no account of custom; and the karma of cruelty is the most terrible of all.

People

“The record is full of other examples of dissimulations and evasions. Even Schacht showed that he, too, had adopted the Nazi attitude that truth is any story which succeeds. Confronted on cross-examination with a long record of broken vows and false words, he declared in justification and I quote from the record: "I think you can score many more successes when you want to lead someone if you don't tell them the truth than if you tell them the truth." This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue their habits of a lifetime in this dock? Credibility is one of the main issues of this Trial. Only those who have failed to learn the bitter lessons of the last decade can doubt that men who have always played on the unsuspecting credulity of generous opponents would not hesitate to do the same, now. It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this Trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: "Say I slew them not." And the Queen replied, "Then say they were not slain. But dead they are…"”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.
Summation for the Prosecution, July 26, 1946
Quotes from the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946)

Men , War , Truth , World

“Later I came awake with a sudden start, remembering the fright and tension that had accompanied my foray into crime. Well, all that was gone now. I could start anew. I did not like to feel tension and fear. I wanted something else, to be human, to be caught up in something meaningful.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Fear , Feeling

“Every movement of his body is an unconscious protest. Every desire, every dream, no matter how intimate or personal, is a plot or a conspiracy. Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state!”

Richard Wright (1908–1960) African-American writer

Native Son (1940)

Dreams , Hope , Personality

“Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Review of Magnolia in Chicago Sun-Times (7 January 2000) http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/magnolia-2000
Reviews, Four star reviews
Context: Magnolia is operatic in its ambition, a great, joyous leap into melodrama and coincidence, with ragged emotions, crimes and punishments, deathbed scenes, romantic dreams, generational turmoil and celestial intervention, all scored to insistent music. It is not a timid film. … The movie is an interlocking series of episodes that take place during one day in Los Angeles, sometimes even at the same moment. Its characters are linked by blood, coincidence and by the way their lives seem parallel. Themes emerge: the deaths of fathers, the resentments of children, the failure of early promise, the way all plans and ambitions can be undermined by sudden and astonishing events. … All of these threads converge, in one way or another, upon an event there is no way for the audience to anticipate. This event is not "cheating," as some critics have argued, because the prologue fully prepares the way for it, as do some subtle references to Exodus. It works like the hand of God, reminding us of the absurdity of daring to plan. And yet plan we must, because we are human, and because sometimes our plans work out.
Magnolia is the kind of film I instinctively respond to. Leave logic at the door. Do not expect subdued taste and restraint, but instead a kind of operatic ecstasy. At three hours it is even operatic in length, as its themes unfold, its characters strive against the dying of the light, and the great wheel of chance rolls on toward them.

Dreams , Music

“There is no crime that the Catholic Church did not commit,—no cruelty that it did not practice,—no form of treachery that it did not reward, and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most powerful enemy of human rights. It did all that organization, cunning, piety, self-denial, heroism, treachery, zeal and brute force could do to enslave the children of men. It was the enemy of intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and the destroyer of progress.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Rome, or Reason? A Reply to Cardinal Manning. Part I. The North American Review (1888)
Context: The people became convinced—being ignorant, stupid and credulous—that the church held the keys of heaven and hell. The foundation for the most terrible mental tyranny that has existed among men was in this way laid. The Catholic Church enslaved to the extent of its power. It resorted to every possible form of fraud; it perverted every good instinct of the human heart; it rewarded every vice; it resorted to every artifice that ingenuity could devise, to reach the highest round of power. It tortured the accused to make them confess; it tortured witnesses to compel the commission of perjury; it tortured children for the purpose of making them convict their parents; it compelled men to establish their own innocence; it imprisoned without limit; it had the malicious patience to wait; it left the accused without trial, and left them in dungeons until released by death. There is no crime that the Catholic Church did not commit,—no cruelty that it did not practice,—no form of treachery that it did not reward, and no virtue that it did not persecute. It was the greatest and most powerful enemy of human rights. It did all that organization, cunning, piety, self-denial, heroism, treachery, zeal and brute force could do to enslave the children of men. It was the enemy of intelligence, the assassin of liberty, and the destroyer of progress.

Men , Children , Intelligence

“We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren’t suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. … Prohibition is a battle against a contagion of the spirit — against an opinion.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

Source: Alternating Current (1967), p. 105
Context: Many psychiatrists think, like Huxley, that these substances [hallucinogens] are neither more nor less dangerous than alcohol. It is not necessary to entirely accept this opinion — although to me it seems to be not far from the truth — in order to recognize that the authorities prohibit these drugs not so much in the name of public health as in the name of public morality. They are a challenge to the ideals of activity, utility, progress, work, and similar notions that justify our daily routine. Alcoholism is an infraction of social rules. Everyone tolerates it because the violation confirms the rules. This case is analogous to prostitution: neither the drunk nor the prostitute and her clientele call into doubt the rules they break. Their acts are a disturbance of order, not a criticism of it. The use of hallucinogens, on the other hand, implies a negation of prevailing social values. … We can now understand the true reason for their condemnation and its severity. The authorities aren’t suppressing a reprehensible practice or a crime. They are suppressing dissidence. … Prohibition is a battle against a contagion of the spirit — against an opinion. The authorities reveal, in their ideological zeal, that they are pursuing a heresy, not a crime.

Understanding

“Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)
Context: Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, two thousand four hundred and sixty years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race.<!--p. 1

Opening statement.

Religion , Motivation

“Rising crime is not due to “society”—but to the steady undermining of personal responsibility and self-discipline—all things which are taught within the family.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech to Conservative Women's Conference (24 May 1978) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103696.
Leader of the Opposition
Context: All over the country, particularly in our large urban areas, old people do go in fear and trembling as never before during either the lifetime of their parents or grandparents... we have been too ready to listen to those who believe that rising crime is due to things like higher unemployment, poor housing, poor pay. While it has always been part of Conservative policy to raise the standard of living of our people we must recognise that in the 1930's there were far more people out of work, far less prosperity and worse housing—but much less crime than now... Rising crime is not due to “society”—but to the steady undermining of personal responsibility and self-discipline—all things which are taught within the family.

Family , Personality

“The old question still remains: Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?”

Gerald Ford (1913–2006) American politician, 38th President of the United States (in office from 1974 to 1977)

Address at Yale Law School's 150th anniversary (25 April 1975)
1970s
Context: The old question still remains: Can a free people restrain crime without sacrificing fundamental liberties and a heritage of compassion?
I am confident of the American answer. Let it become a vital element on America's new agenda. Let us show that we can temper together those opposite elements of liberty and restraint into one consistent whole. Let us set an example for the world of a law-abiding America glorying in its freedom as well as its respect for law.

People , Question

“These religions teach the slave virtues. They make inanimate things holy, and falsehoods sacred. They create artificial crimes.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Would You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide? (1900)
Context: These religions teach the slave virtues. They make inanimate things holy, and falsehoods sacred. They create artificial crimes. To eat meat on Friday, to enjoy yourself on Sunday, to eat on fast-days, to be happy in Lent, to dispute a priest, to ask for evidence, to deny a creed, to express your sincere thought, all these acts are sins, crimes against some god, To give your honest opinion about Jehovah, Mohammed or Christ, is far worse than to maliciously slander your neighbor. To question or doubt miracles. is far worse than to deny known facts. Only the obedient, the credulous, the cringers, the kneelers, the meek, the unquestioning, the true believers, are regarded as moral, as virtuous. It is not enough to be honest, generous and useful; not enough to be governed by evidence, by facts. In addition to this, you must believe. These things are the foes of morality. They subvert all natural conceptions of virtue.

Religion

“This amendment supplies that defect, and allows Congress to correct the unjust legislation of the States, so far that the law which operates upon one man shall operate equally upon all. Whatever law punishes a white man for a crime shall punish the black man precisely in the same way and to the same degree. Whatever law protects the white man shall afford equal protection to the black man. Whatever means of redress is afforded to one shall be afforded to all. Whatever law allows the white man to testify in court shall allow the man of color to do the same.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, Speech in the House of Representatives (1871)
Context: I can hardly believe that any person can be found who will not admit that every one of these provisions is just. They are all asserted, in some form or other, in our Declaration or organic law. But the Constitution limits only the action of Congress, and is not a limitation on the States. This amendment supplies that defect, and allows Congress to correct the unjust legislation of the States, so far that the law which operates upon one man shall operate equally upon all. Whatever law punishes a white man for a crime shall punish the black man precisely in the same way and to the same degree. Whatever law protects the white man shall afford equal protection to the black man. Whatever means of redress is afforded to one shall be afforded to all. Whatever law allows the white man to testify in court shall allow the man of color to do the same. These are great advantages over their present codes. Now different degrees of punishment are inflicted, not on account of the magnitude of the crime, but according to the color of the skin. Now color disqualifies a man from testifying in courts or being tried in the same way as white men.

Law , Color , Way

“Politicians always like to say "I'm gonna fight crime!" because it makes them sound great and gets them votes. But what can a politician do to fight crime?”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

I Ain't Got Time To Bleed (1999)
Context: People are always shocked when they ask me what I plan to do about crime as governor and my answer comes back as "Nothing!" Does the issue of crime need to be addressed? You bet it does. But, just as with many other social issues, I don't think that legislation is the most effective arena in which to fight crime. We already have tons of laws on the books. Most of those laws would work more effectively if we just enforced them better.
As governor, there isn't a lot I can do beyond that to crack down on crime. Law enforcement is really a local issue. It's the cops' job to tighten down on criminals.
Politicians always like to say "I'm gonna fight crime!" because it makes them sound great and gets them votes. But what can a politician do to fight crime?

Fight

“Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

A response to the Nazi book burnings, in "To Posterity" (1939) as translated by H. R. Hays (1947)
Context: Do not treat me in this fashion. Don't leave me out. Have I not
Always spoken the truth in my books? And now
You treat me like a liar! I order you:
Burn me!
Those who lead the country into the abyss
Call ruling too difficult
For ordinary men.
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!

Age , Tree , Silence

“Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional, and we live in a three-dimensional world. Cults are as dangerous as drugs. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul.”

Ronald DeWolf (1934–1991) American critic of Scientology

Interview in Penthouse (June 1983)
Context: I don't think that anyone should think for you. And that's exactly what cults do. All cults, including Scientology, say, "I am your mind, I am your brain. I've done all the work for you, I've laid the path open for you. All you have to do is turn your mind off and walk down the path I have created." Well, I have learned that there's great strength in diversity, that a clamorous discussion or debate is very healthy and should be encouraged. That's why I like our political setup in the United States: simply because you can fight and argue and jump up and down and shout and scream and have all kinds of viewpoints, regardless of how wrongheaded or ridiculous they might be. People here don't have to give up their right to perceive things the way they believe. Scientology and all the other cults are one-dimensional, and we live in a three-dimensional world. Cults are as dangerous as drugs. They commit the highest crime: the rape of the soul.

World , Soul

“For all other crimes we give asylum, for the most heinous crime in the universe we give no asylum.”

R. A. Lafferty (1914–2002) American writer

Source: Space Chantey (1968), Ch. 7
Context: "For one crime there is no asylum even in the Club," whispered Horace the Snake, who had sharp ears for whispering. "For all other crimes we give asylum, for the most heinous crime in the universe we give no asylum."
"What is the most heinous crime in the universe?" Roadstrum asked.
"Killing a songbird."

Universe

“This underprivileged group of people on my right is no less intelligent or less worthy than their fellow human beings on the other side of the aisle. They were simply born into this fate.
In the real world, this imbalance in living conditions inevitably leads to inequality of opportunity, and in many cases loss of hope. And what is worse, all too often the plight of the poor is compounded by and results in human rights abuses, a lack of good governance, and a deep sense of injustice. This combination naturally creates a most fertile breeding ground for civil wars, organized crime, and extremism in its different forms.”

Mohamed ElBaradei (1942) Egyptian law scholar and diplomat, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Nobel …

Nobel lecture (2005)
Context: What is more important is that these are not separate or distinct threats. When we scratch the surface, we find them closely connected and interrelated.
We are 1,000 people here today in this august hall. Imagine for a moment that we represent the world's population. These 200 people on my left would be the wealthy of the world, who consume 80 per cent of the available resources. And these 400 people on my right would be living on an income of less than $2 per day.
This underprivileged group of people on my right is no less intelligent or less worthy than their fellow human beings on the other side of the aisle. They were simply born into this fate.
In the real world, this imbalance in living conditions inevitably leads to inequality of opportunity, and in many cases loss of hope. And what is worse, all too often the plight of the poor is compounded by and results in human rights abuses, a lack of good governance, and a deep sense of injustice. This combination naturally creates a most fertile breeding ground for civil wars, organized crime, and extremism in its different forms.
In regions where conflicts have been left to fester for decades, countries continue to look for ways to offset their insecurities or project their 'power'. In some cases, they may be tempted to seek their own weapons of mass destruction, like others who have preceded them.

Fate , War , People , World

“The duty to disclose knowledge of crime rests upon all citizens.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Stein v. New York, 346 U.S. 156, 184 (1953)
Judicial opinions

Knowledge

“No God created the crime of murder, and no God created sorrow or pain”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 273
Context: No God created the crime of murder, and no God created sorrow or pain... Again, because you believe that you can murder a man and end his consciousness forever, then murder exists within your reality and must be dealt with... The assassin of Dr. King believes that he has blotted out a living consciousness for all eternity... But your errors and mistakes, luckily enough, are not real and do not affect reality, for Dr. King still lives.

God , Pain

“I must say, extreme justice is an extreme injury: For we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital, nor of that opinion of the Stoics that makes all crimes equal; as if there were no difference to be made between the killing a man and the taking his purse, between which, if we examine things impartially, there is no likeness nor proportion. God has commanded us not to kill, and shall we kill so easily for a little money?”

Thomas More book Utopia

Source: Utopia (1516), Ch. 1 : Discourses of Raphael Hythloday, of the Best State of a Commonwealth

Justice , Law

“Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Draft for a Statement of Human Obligation (1943), Statement Of Obligations
Context: The human soul has need of consented obedience and of liberty.
Consented obedience is what one concedes to an authority because one judges it to be legitimate. It is not possible in relation to a political power established by conquest or coup d'etat nor to an economic power based upon money.
Liberty is the power of choice within the latitude left between the direct constraint of natural forces and the authority accepted as legitimate. The latitude should be sufficiently wide for liberty to be more than a fiction, but it should include only what is innocent and should never be wide enough to permit certain kinds of crime.

Nature

“The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)
Context: The way was paved for absolute monarchy to triumph over the spirit and institutions of a better age, not by isolated acts of wickedness, but by a studied philosophy of crime, and so thorough a perversion of the moral sense that the like of it had not been since the Stoics reformed the morality of paganism.
The clergy who had in so many ways served the cause of freedom during the prolonged strife against feudalism and slavery, were associated now with the interest of royalty.

Age , Way , Study

“He is compelled to insist that Jehovah is as bad now as he was then; that he is as good now as he was then. Once, all the crimes that I have mentioned were commanded by God; now they are prohibited. Once, God was in favor of them all; now the Devil is their defender. In other words, the Devil entertains the same opinion to-day that God held four thousand years ago. The Devil is as good now as Jehovah was then, and God was as bad then as the Devil is now.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Some Reasons Why (1881)
Context: The believer in the inspiration of the Bible is compelled to say, that there was a time when slavery was right, when women could sell their babes, when polygamy was the highest form of virtue, when wars of extermination were waged with the sword of mercy, when religious toleration was a crime, and when death was the just penalty for having expressed an honest thought. He is compelled to insist that Jehovah is as bad now as he was then; that he is as good now as he was then. Once, all the crimes that I have mentioned were commanded by God; now they are prohibited. Once, God was in favor of them all; now the Devil is their defender. In other words, the Devil entertains the same opinion to-day that God held four thousand years ago. The Devil is as good now as Jehovah was then, and God was as bad then as the Devil is now.

God

“I read Stein’s Three Lives, Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and Dostoevski’s The Possessed, all of which revealed new realms of feeling. But the most important discoveries came when I veered from fiction proper into the field of psychology and sociology. I ran through volumes that bore upon the causes of my conduct and the conduct of my family. I studied tables of figures relating population density to insanity, relating housing to disease, relating school and recreational opportunities to crime, relating various forms of neurotic behavior to environment, relating racial insecurities to the conflicts between whites and blacks… I still had no friends, casual or intimate, and felt the need for none. I had developed a self-sufficiency that kept me distant from others, emotionally and psychologically.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

Disease , School , Family , Behavior

“In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie a misdemeanour, the declaration of the truth a crime.”

Arthur Ponsonby (1871–1946) British Liberal and later Labour politician and pacifist

Falsehood in Wartime (1928), Introduction
Context: Between nations, where the consequences are vital, where the destiny of countries and provinces hangs in the balance, the lives and fortunes of millions are affected and civilization itself is menaced, the most upright men honestly believe that there is no depth of duplicity to which they may not legitimately stoop. They have got to do it. The thing cannot go on without the help of lies.
This is no plea that lies should not be used in war-time, but a demonstration of how lies must be used in war-time. If the truth were told from the outset, there would be no reason and no will for war.
Anyone declaring the truth: "Whether you are right or wrong, whether you win or lose, in no circumstances can war help you or your country," would find himself in gaol very quickly. In war-time, failure to lie is negligence, the doubting of a lie a misdemeanour, the declaration of the truth a crime.

War , Truth , Lie , Failure

“I shall not dissent from this consensus, nor do I deny that all these dead and missing men shared the guilt. In crimes so reprehensible that degrees of guilt have lost their significance they may have played the most evil parts.”

Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge

Summation for the Prosecution, July 26, 1946
Quotes from the Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946)
Context: These men saw no evil, spoke none, and none was uttered in their presence. This claim might sound very plausible if made by one defendant. But when we put all their stories together, the impression which emerges of the Third Reich, which was to last a thousand years, is ludicrous. If we combine only the stories of the front bench, this is the ridiculous composite picture of Hitler's Government that emerges. It was composed of:
A No. 2 man who knew nothing of the excesses of the Gestapo which he created, and never suspected the Jewish extermination programme although he was the signer of over a score of decrees which instituted the persecution of that race;
A No. 3 man who was merely an innocent middleman transmitting Hitler's orders without even reading them, like a postman or delivery boy;
A Foreign Minister who knew little of foreign affairs and nothing of foreign policy;
A Field-Marshal who issued orders to the armed forces but had no idea of the results they would have in practice …
… This may seem like a fantastic exaggeration, but this is what you would actually be obliged to conclude if you were to acquit these defendants.
They do protest too much. They deny knowing what was common knowledge. They deny knowing plans and programmes that were as public as Mein Kampf and the Party programme. They deny even knowing the contents of documents which they received and acted upon. … The defendants have been unanimous, when pressed, in shifting the blame on other men, sometimes on one and sometimes on another. But the names they have repeatedly picked are Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, and Bormann. All of these are dead or missing. No matter how hard we have pressed the defendants on the stand, they have never pointed the finger at a living man as guilty. It is a temptation to ponder the wondrous workings of a fate which has left only the guilty dead and only the innocent alive. It is almost too remarkable.
The chief villain on whom blame is placed — some of the defendants vie with each other in producing appropriate epithets — is Hitler. He is the man at whom nearly every defendant has pointed an accusing finger.
I shall not dissent from this consensus, nor do I deny that all these dead and missing men shared the guilt. In crimes so reprehensible that degrees of guilt have lost their significance they may have played the most evil parts. But their guilt cannot exculpate the defendants. Hitler did not carry all responsibility to the grave with him. All the guilt is not wrapped in Himmler's shroud. It was these dead men whom these living chose to be their partners in this great conspiratorial brotherhood, and the crimes that they did together they must pay for one by one.

Men , Evil , Parting , Dead

“They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.”

Mark Ames (1965) American writer and journalist

Part V: More Rage. More Rage., page 184.
Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion, From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond (2005)
Context: Americans wanted to blame everything but Columbine High for the massacre- they blamed a violent media, Marilyn Manson, Goth culture, the Internet, the Trench Coat Mafia, video games, lax gun control laws, and liberal values. And still skipping over the school, they peered into the opposite direction, blaming the moral and/or mental sickness, or alleged homosexuality, of these two boys, as if they were exceptional freaks in a school of otherwise happy kids. They searched all over the world for a motive, except for one place: the scene of the crime.

World , Search , Motivation

“Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy was the motive.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

Source: The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)
Context: Nations eagerly invested their rulers with every prerogative needed to preserve their faith, and all the care to keep Church and State asunder, and to prevent the confusion of their powers, which had been the work of ages, was renounced in the intensity of the crisis. Atrocious deeds were done, in which religious passion was often the instrument, but policy was the motive.
Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.

Motivation , Passion

“The league between virtue and nature engages all things to assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and substances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods the track of every partridge and fox and squirrel and mole. You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet or clew. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The laws and substances of nature — water, snow, wind, gravitation — become penalties to the thief.
On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm; but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he approached, cast down their colors and from enemies became friends, so disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, prove benefactors: —
::"Winds blow and waters roll
Strength to the brave, and power and deity,
Yet in themselves are nothing."”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him.
1840s, Essays: First Series (1841), Compensation

Love , Hostility , Truth , World

“Every social state supposes… a certain number and a certain order of crimes, these being merely the necessary consequences of its organisation. This observation”

Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician and sociologist

Introductory
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)
Context: Every social state supposes... a certain number and a certain order of crimes, these being merely the necessary consequences of its organisation. This observation, so discouraging at first sight, becomes, on the contrary, consolatory, when examined more nearly, by showing the possibility of ameliorating the human race, by modifying their institutions, their habits, the amount of their information, and, generally, all which influences their mode of existence.

“Iraq was responsible for terrible crimes in Kuwait, with several thousand killed and many tortured. But that is not war; rather, state terrorism, of the kind familiar among U.S. clients. The second phase of the conflict began with the U.S.-U.K. attack”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Z Magazine, August 31, 1991 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/articles/z9110-aftermath.html.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994
Context: The crisis began with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a year ago. There was some fighting, leaving hundreds killed according to Human Rights groups. That hardly qualifies as war. Rather, in terms of crimes against peace and against humanity, it falls roughly into the category of the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1978, and the U. S. invasion of Panama. In these terms it falls well short of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and cannot remotely be compared with the near-genocidal Indonesian invasion and annexation of East Timor, to mention only two cases of aggression that are still in progress, with continuing atrocities and with the crucial support of those who most passionately professed their outrage over Iraq's aggression. During the subsequent months, Iraq was responsible for terrible crimes in Kuwait, with several thousand killed and many tortured. But that is not war; rather, state terrorism, of the kind familiar among U. S. clients. The second phase of the conflict began with the U. S.-U. K. attack of January 15 (with marginal participation of others). This was slaughter http://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/gulfwar/index.htm, not war.

War

“Nationalism can take on some very ugly shapes. It looks as if as many crimes will be committed in its name as in the name of Religion or of Liberty.”

Stanley Baldwin (1867–1947) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the St. David's Day Banquet in Cardiff (1 March 1927), quoted in Our Inheritance (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1938), pp. 46-47.
1927
Context: ... that chauvinistic spirit which so often has been the curse of modern Europe. The best way in which you can develop a true national feeling and put your own country in the pride of place which belongs to her is to do it in communion with other nations and with the sole object of improving the world at large. It is not from disillusionment we have suffered since the War; we are taking a more sober view both of ourselves and of the world... Nationalism can take on some very ugly shapes. It looks as if as many crimes will be committed in its name as in the name of Religion or of Liberty. Indeed the source of the trouble is that Nationalists are apt to assume the garments of Religion... Love of one's country has been perverted into hatred of our neighbour's country by the preaching of lop-sided intellectuals, who themselves generally manage to escape the martyrdom they provide for others.

Religion

“As far as I can see, I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. … My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all.”

Dorothy Thompson (1893–1961) American journalist and radio broadcaster

Statement of August 1934, after being expelled from Germany, quoted in Dorothy Thompson : A Legend In Her Time (1973) by Marion K. Sanders, p. 199
Context: As far as I can see, I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. … My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. This is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says that Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people — an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are German you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen to one.

Thinking

“I'm convinced that the victim-to-be picks out the assailant with as much skill and craft as the murderer seeks his victim, and until we learn much more about both, we'll get nowhere battling crime.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 205
Context: I believe too thoroughly that we create our own reality, for one thing -- an unpopular belief where violence is concerned -- but I'm convinced that the victim-to-be picks out the assailant with as much skill and craft as the murderer seeks his victim, and until we learn much more about both, we'll get nowhere battling crime. I'm not justifying murder by any means, but I'm saying that the victim wants to be murdered -- perhaps to be punished, if not by a vengeful god then by one of his fellows, and that a would-be murderer can switch in a minute and become the victim instead; and that the slayer wants to be slain.

Learning

“And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur.”

George F. Kennan (1904–2005) American advisor, diplomat, political scientist and historian

American Diplomacy (1951), World War I
Context: There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments; that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities — politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent. These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas — complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. The counsels of impatience and hatred can always be supported by the crudest and cheapest symbols; for the counsels of moderation, the reasons are often intricate, rather than emotional, and difficult to explain. And so the chauvinists of all times and places go their appointed way: plucking the easy fruits, reaping the little triumphs of the day at the expense of someone else tomorrow, deluging in noise and filth anyone who gets in their way, dancing their reckless dance on the prospects for human progress, drawing the shadow of a great doubt over the validity of democratic institutions. And until people learn to spot the fanning of mass emotions and the sowing of bitterness, suspicion, and intolerance as crimes in themselves — as perhaps the greatest disservice that can be done to the cause of popular government — this sort of thing will continue to occur.

People , Learning

“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.”

Albert Jay Nock (1870–1945) American journalist

"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.

Men , Boy

“Capital is said … to fly turbulence and strife, and to be timid, which is very true; but this is very incompletely stating the question. Capital eschews no profit, or very small profit, just as Nature was formerly said to abhor a vacuum. With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent. will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent. certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent., positive audacity; 100 per cent. will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent., and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulence and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both. Smuggling and the slave-trade have amply proved all that is here stated.”

Томас Джозеф Даннинг (1799–1873)

Law , Question , Nature , Chance

“The great majority of crimes committed in bourgeois society are either direct infringements of property rights or are indirectly connected with property.”

Nikolai Bukharin (1888–1938) Soviet politician

74
ABC's of Communism

“If people would but understand that they are not the sons of some fatherland or other, nor of Governments, but are sons of God, and can therefore neither be slaves nor enemies one to another - those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations and crimes which they occasion, would cease.”

Leo Tolstoy book Patriotism and Government

Patriotism and Government

God , People , Suffering , Understanding

“The Irish had owed their success to crime. Winston practically admitted it. They had defied British rule,—and British rulers had given in to them. How could such a state of things be said to fit in with the scheme of the Empire?”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Remarks after the publication of Winston Churchill's book The Aftermath (1929), quoted in Blanche E. C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour, First Earl of Balfour, K.G., O.M., F.R.S., Etc. 1906–1930 (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd, 1936), p. 248
Lord President of the Council

Success

“I speak perhaps, with a warmth of indignation unbefitting a Foreign Secretary, but with the news of this outrage...I confess that I find it difficult to measure my epithets, for...this Irish packet boat, crammed as it always is with men, women, and children, in broad daylight was deliberately torpedoed by a German submarine. It was carrying no military stores. It was serving no military ends. It was pure barbarism, pure frightfulness, deliberately carried out. ... I cannot measure the wicked folly of the proceeding of which they have been guilty. ... I wish I could think that these atrocious crimes were the crimes of a small dominant military caste. I agree that the direction of policy, the direction of national policy, may be in the hands of a small caste, but it is incredible that crimes like these, perpetrated in the light of day, known to all mankind, condemned from one end of the civilized world to the other, should go on being repeated month after month of four years of embittered warfare if it did not commend itself to the population which commits them.”

Arthur James Balfour (1848–1930) British Conservative politician and statesman

Speech to a lunch of the English-Speaking Union in the Criterion Restaurant (11 October 1918) after the sinking of the RMS Leinster, quoted in The Times (12 October 1918), p. 2
Foreign Secretary

Light , Children , Thinking , World

“I do not believe that unless you can persuade parents that the family should still remain the unit in which discipline is applied, you will never get a conquest of the crime wave. ... We have created a better and happier state from the material point of view, but, at the same time, there is no doubt that the younger generation, especially just before leaving school, and between the ages of 17 and 19, are much more unruly than is right in a modern, civilized society.”

Rab Butler (1902–1982) British politician

Remark at the annual conference of the Conservative and Unionist Teachers' Association in London (17 June 1961), quoted in The Times (19 June 1961), p. 7
Home Secretary

School , Family , Time , Parent

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”

Harold Pinter (1930–2008) playwright from England

Art, Truth & Politics (2005)

Universe , Exercises , People , Success

“A large part of the problem of understanding how modern rebellions come about is the reporting of them. Euphoric moments are condensed to slogans on one hand and on the other into vivid narratives of the crimes of the fallen regime. What falls through the cracks is the process by which the actions of an often small dissident circle are translated into a mass movement involving a sufficient cross-section of society to sweep away a tyrant. If that clouds our understanding, so too does the tendency to limit our examination of rebellions to the facts of the revolutionary moment itself. Instead, what we should be doing is examining why populations ever accept dictatorships. In doing so, we may comprehend more about why they are then rejected, often so suddenly.”

Peter Beaumont (journalist) (1961) British journalist

How dictators fall https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/02/protests-how-dictators-fall, 2 Mar 2011, The Guardian.

Problem , Understanding , Parting

“It is true that Armageddon is raging and incredible crimes have been committed, but it is also true that against the background of these terrors a speedy evolution rushes onward. Is it possible that people do not see how much of the new is entering life? We should not permit the doubting worldlings to proclaim that the dark forces are victorious. That which belongs to Infinity cannot be conquered. The Thinker wisely encouraged His disciples, and prophesied the victory of the Forces of Light.”

Helena Roerich (1879–1955) Russian philosopher

259
Armageddon

Light , Victory , People , Rage

“When you consider that 100 percent of WikiLeaks leaks are authentic and accurate, you can understand the impact, as well as the fury generated among secretive powerful forces. Julian Assange is a political refugee in London for one reason only: WikiLeaks told the truth about the greatest crimes of the 21st century. He is not forgiven for that, and he should be supported by journalists and by people everywhere.”

John Pilger (1939) Australian journalist

Real journalists act as agents of people, not power, Daily Star (Bangladesh) https://www.thedailystar.net/opinion/interviews/news/real-journalists-act-agents-people-not-power-1687921 (16 January 2019)

Understanding , Support , People , Truth

“They go off to sea for nine months, they’re sick half the time, bad things happen to them, they see others die. Then they come back home and they have not a cent in their account. The way it ruins these men in their very spirit is a crime that’s horrific to see. And it’s hard to capture that in writing because wage theft, that term, is so boring. But on the ocean, it’s so pervasive and so ruinous that I would put it up there on par with putting men in an oven and cooking them slowly.”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On the victims of wage theft in “Wage Theft, Slavery, and Climate Change on the Outlaw Ocean” https://civileats.com/2019/09/27/wage-theft-slavery-and-climate-change-on-the-outlaw-ocean/ (Civil Eats; 2019 Sep 27)

Home , Time , Bad luck , Way

“All of these types of abuses, whether they’re human rights abuses, or environmental crimes, stem from a core problem, which is a lack of governance at sea, especially on the high seas. Specifically, there are three ways in which misbehavior happens offshore routinely and with impunity: too few rules, a lack of enforcement, and insufficient awareness of what is happening there. All of these problems are also connected in the sense that they occur with a certain tacit complicity from all of us who live on land…”

Ian Urbina (1972) American journalist

On his book The Outlaw Ocean in “The Outlaw Ocean project – interview with Ian Urbina” https://hopeforjustice.org/news/2019/07/the-outlaw-ocean-project-interview-with-ian-urbina/ (Hope for Justice; Jul 2019)

Sense , Problem , Sea , Way

“Magic has been confounded too long with the jugglery of mountebanks, the hallucinations of disordered minds and the crimes of certain unusual malefactors. There are otherwise many who would promptly explain Magic as the art of producing effects in the absence of causes; and on the strength of such a definition it will be said by ordinary people — with the good sense which characterises the ordinary, in the midst of much injustice — that Magic is an absurdity.”

Eliphas Levi (1810–1875) French writer

Introduction
The History Of Magic (1860)

Sense , People , Art

“The modern financial system is not perfect, but upon a detailed examination of the crime is unfair. Money is not a measure of labor, but a means of exploitation amusing the elite’s ambitions. It all depends on how profitable cash flows are, and not on the basis of the principle of measuring labor, on the basis of one’s own interests, usurping the distribution of money. Gestures and laws of this kind, and they all use this system and dream, must go to this hierarchy, gain control over the money in order to engage in usurpation of resources. After killing the dragon, they themselves want to become a dragon.”

Maxim Mernes (1996) Russian businessman, investor, blogger

About the state and technology

Money , Law , Dependency , Dreams

“World War II, at least in Europe, may have had some moral justification, though there can be some legitimate debate as to whether the US and its freedoms were ever really threatened, and certainly many of the Americans who died in that war saw their struggle as worthy, so that we may at least in good conscience honor their deaths. But Khe Sanh? Mosul? And for god’s sake, Marjah? Let’s get real. Khe Sanh, one of the major battles in the Vietnam War, was just one little piece of a huge malignant disaster in a war that was criminal from its inception, and that had no purpose beyond perpetuating the neocolonialist control by the US of a long-subjugated people who were fighting to be free, just as our own ancestors had done. The over 58,000 Americans who died in that war, who contributed to the killing of over 2 million Vietnamese, many or most of them civilians, may have engaged in personal acts of bravery, but they were not, as a group, heroes. Nor were they over there fighting for American freedom. Some, like Lt. William Calley, who did not die, were no doubt murderers. Most, though, were simply victims–victims of their own government’s years of lying and deceit. If we memorialize them, it should be by vowing never again to allow our government to commit such crimes, and to send Americans to fight and die for such criminal policies. Sadly, we’ve already allowed that to happen, though, over and over again–in the Panama, in Grenada, in Iraq, and now in Afghanistan and perhaps, before long, Iran and/or Pakistan.”

Dave Lindorff (1949) Award winning American journalist

The Glorification of War, 2010

God , Freedom , War , Personality

“This is a political trial. What is at issue here is not at all whether I committed a crime. What is at issue is that certain intentions are ascribed to me from which consequences are later derived that are beyond the expertise of any conceivable lawyer. The point here is that the truth about the events in the former Yugoslavia has to be told here. It is that which is at issue, not the procedural questions, because I’m not sitting here because I was accused of a specific crime. I’m sitting here because I am accused of conducting a policy against the interests of this or another party. The nature of he proceedings here is such that a lawyer cannot deal with it.”

Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006) Yugoslavian and Serbian politician

Slobodan Milošević (2004) International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia https://www.icty.org/x/cases/slobodan_milosevic/trans/en/041021DR.htm

Truth , Question , Nature

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty. The severity of tyrants has barbarity for its principle; that of a republican government is founded on beneficence. Therefore let him beware who should dare to influence the people by that terror which is made only for their enemies! Let him beware, who, regarding the inevitable errors of civism in the same light, with the premeditated crimes of perfidiousness, or the attempts of conspirators, suffers the dangerous intriguer to escape and pursues the peaceable citizen! Death to the villain who dares abuse the sacred name of liberty or the powerful arms intended for her defence, to carry mourning or death to the patriotic heart...”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Principles to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Republic (February 1794)

Forgiveness , Death , Light , Suffering

“We wish, in a word, to fulfill the intentions of nature and the destiny of man, realize the promises of philosophy, and acquit providence of a long reign of crime and tyranny. That France, once illustrious among enslaved nations, may, by eclipsing the glory of all free countries that ever existed, become a model to nations, a terror to oppressors, a consolation to the oppressed, an ornament of the universe and that, by sealing the work with our blood, we may at least witness the dawn of the bright day of universal happiness. This is our ambition, - this is the end of our efforts....”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Principles to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Republic (February 1794)

Universe , Nature , Effort , Country

“I utter this deadly truth with regret, but Louis must die, because the homeland has to live. Among a peaceable, free people, respected at home and abroad, you might listen to the advice being given you to be generous; but a people whose liberty is still being disputed after so many sacrifices and battles, a people in whose country the laws are still only inexorable towards the unfortunate, a people in whose country the crimes of tyranny are still subjects of dispute, such a people must want to be avenged; and the generosity for which you are being praised would resemble too much that of a society of bandits sharing out spoils.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Speech on the Trial of Louis XVI (Dec. 3, 1792)

Home , Law , Country , People

“But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

Speech of Thermidor Year II (26 July 1794)

Soul , Heart , Passion , World

“Things have been said to you about the Jews that are infinitely exaggerated and often contrary to history. How can the persecutions they have suffered at the hands of different peoples be held against them? These on the contrary are national crimes that we ought to expiate, by granting them imprescriptible human rights of which no human power could despoil them. Faults are still imputed to them, prejudices, exaggerated by the sectarian spirit and by interests. But to what can we really impute them but our own injustices? After having excluded them from all honours, even the right to public esteem, we have left them with nothing but the objects of lucrative speculation. Let us deliver them to happiness, to the homeland, to virtue, by granting them the dignity of men and citizens; let us hope that it can never be policy, whatever people say, to condemn to degradation and oppression a multitude of men who live among us. How could the social interest be based on violation of the eternal principles of justice and reason that are the foundations of every human society?”

Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician

"On Voting Rights for Actors and Jews" (21 December 1789)

Justice , History , Suffering , Hope

“The home office hates vigilantes in Lycra fancy-dress outfits almost as much as they hate lawbreakers. You see, superheroes don’t follow the rules of evidence. They take procedural shortcuts, assault criminals, mess up crime scenes, and generally make it almost impossible to secure a conviction. Not to mention committing a basketload of offenses in their own right: aggravated trespass, assault, violating controlled airspace and flying without a license, breaking and entering, criminal damage...”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Annihilation Score (2015), Chapter 4, “Briefings” (p. 63)

Home , Making love , Hate , Flying

“No God created the crime of murder, and no God created sorrow or pain... Again, because you believe that you can murder a man and end his consciousness forever, then murder exists within your reality and must be dealt with... The assassin of Dr. King believes that he has blotted out a living consciousness for all eternity... But your errors and mistakes, luckily enough, are not real and do not affect reality, for Dr. King still lives.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 273

Error , God , Pain , Reality

“You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before. At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens. Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. We are one Nation, and their pain is our pain, their dreams are our dreams, and their success will be our success. We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny. The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2017, January, Inaugural address, (January 20, 2017)

School , Home , Family , Pain

“He surely failed as prime minister to prevent the tragedy at Ayodhya. But his rivals in the Congress did their own party such disservice by spreading the canard that his (and their) government was responsible for that crime. This, more than anything else, lost them the Muslim vote in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar… any dispassionate reading of recent political history will tell you that this is a self-inflicted injury. The Congress has itself built a mythology whereby the Muslims have come to hold their party as responsible for Babri as the BJP … If you take Justice Liberhan’s indictment of so many in the BJP seriously, you cannot at the same time dismiss his exoneration of Rao, and the government, and the Congress Party under him. You surely cannot put the clock back on so much injustice done to him, like not even allowing his body to be taken inside the AICC building. But the least you can do now is to give him a memorial spot too along the Yamuna as one of our more significant (and secular) prime ministers who led us creditably through five difficult years, crafted our post-Cold War diplomacy, launched economic reform and, most significantly, discovered the political talent and promise of a quiet economist called Manmohan Singh.”

P. V. Narasimha Rao (1921–2004) Indian politician

Shekhar Gupta in Tearing down Narasimha Rao http://archive.indianexpress.com/news/tearingdownnarasimharao/547260/1, The Indian Express, 7 September 2011.

Time , Justice , Reading , History

“The past is really unknowable, but it’s got to be knowable enough so that we can seek forgiveness for our crimes…”

Ariel Dorfman (1942) Chilean writer

On confronting and atoning for the past in “Ariel Dorfman: 'Not to belong anywhere, to be displaced, is not a bad thing for a writer'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/09/ariel-dorfman-not-to-belong-anywhere-to-be-displaced-is-not-a-bad-thing-for-a-writer in The Guardian (2018 May 9)

Forgiveness , Past

“We find, in the rules laid down by the greatest English Judges, who have been the brightest of mankind; We are to look upon it as more beneficial, that many guilty persons should escape unpunished, than one innocent person should suffer. The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world, that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner, that it is not of much consequence to the public, whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself, is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, it is immaterial to me, whether I behave well or ill; for virtue itself, is no security. And if such a sentiment as this, should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security what so ever.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

In Adams' Argument for the Defense in the case of Rex v. Wemms: Suffolk Superior Court, Boston, 3-4 December, 1770; source "The Adams Papers", http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/
1770s

Time , Personality , Suffering , Communication

“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)

Dependency , Law , Support , Way

“Criminology, the study of crime and its causes, has a fundamental weak spot: it studies that proportion of the criminal population who are stupid or unlucky enough to get caught. The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended—indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized as not crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal a paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Afterword, “The Golden Age of Spying” (pp. 388-389)
The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006)

Study , Law , Business , Perfection

“Some of the worst crimes against humanity are committed by architecture students.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Jennifer Morgue (2006), Chapter 1, “Random Ramona” (p. 18)

“Of Streicher, one need say nothing. Here is a man more responsible, perhaps, than any, for the most frightful crime the world has ever known. For 25 years the extermination of the Jews had been his terrible ambition. For 25 years he had educated the German people in the philosophy of hate, of brutality, of murder. He had incited and prepared them to support the Nazi policy, to accept and participate in the brutal persecution and slaughter of millions of his fellow men. Without him these things could not have been. It is long since he forfeited all right to live.”

Julius Streicher (1885–1946) German politician

Sir Hartley Shawcross, British prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, July 27, 1946 https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/07-27-46.asp - day 188 of the trial

Hate , Support , People , World

“Every crime almost is a good thing, looked at from the exclusive standpoint of the criminal. If it were not so, it would never be committed. But from the standpoint of the one on whom the crime falls it is likely to be a very different thing—how different depends on the degree of diversity of the interests involved. The only rational method of judging conduct, and the only method that should ever be employed by beings pretending to be logical or civilised, is to balance the effects which the act on trial has on the different interests involved, and then render a verdict from the standpoint of this balance, which is the standpoint of the universe.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 53

Universe , Dependency

“Look at the scenes to be met with in our great cities! They are sufficient to horrify any being susceptible enough to the sufferings of others to be rated as one-fifth civilized. An army of butchers standing in blood ankle-deep and plunging great knives into writhing, shrieking living beings; helpless swine swinging by their hinders with their blood gushing from their slashed jugulars; unsuspecting oxen with trustful eyes looking up at the deadly pole-ax, and a moment later lying aquiver under its relentless thud; an atmosphere in perpetual churn with the groans and screams of the dying; streets thronged with unprocessioned funerals; dead bodies dangling from sale hooks or sprawling on chopping blocks; men and women going about praying and preaching, and sitting down two or three times a day and pouncing on the uncoffined remains of some poor creature cut down for them by the callous hands of hired cutthroats—such are the sights in all our streets and stockyards, and such are the crimes inflicted day after day by Christian cannibals on the defenseless dumb ones of this world.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: The New Ethics (1907), Human Attitude Toward Others, p. 44

Time , Swine , Dead , Suffering

“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

Universe , Life

“The denial by human animals of ethical relations to the rest of the animal world is a phenomenon not differing either in character or cause from the denial of ethical relations by a tribe, people, or race of human beings to the rest of the human world. The provincialism of Jews toward non-Jews, of Greeks toward non-Greeks, of Romans toward non-Romans, of Moslems toward non-Moslems, and of Caucasians toward non-Caucasians, is not one thing and the provincialism of human beings toward non -human beings another. They are all manifestations of the same thing. The fact that these various acts are performed by different individuals and upon different individuals, and are performed at different times and places, does not invalidate the essential sameness of their natures. Crimes are not classified (except by savages or their immediate derivatives) according to the similarity of those who do them or those who suffer from them, but by grouping them according to the similarity of their intrinsic qualities. All acts of provincialism consist essentially in the disinclination or inability to be universal, and they belong in reality, all of them, to the same species of conduct.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

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

Time , Suffering , People , Nature

“All school-room competition should be abolished. The school should be a family, a fraternity, a colony of cooperating, helping, sympathizing brothers and sisters, not a camp of hot combatants bent on mutual discomfiture. Competition is not necessary, and if it were necessary, it would not be justifiable. If it is not possible to produce great intellects without crimes on character, then let us doze forever in the holy haze of mediocrity. A graceful nature is the most essential psychic possession of a living being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Individual Culture, p. 264

School , Family , Help , Nature

“Parenthood is the gravest of all responsibilities. The act of generation is a momentous act. It should be illuminated. It should be more serious, and deliberate, and conscious. It should be far more frequently neglected. Human beings should know that it is a grave conspiracy, the conspiracy to bring into the universe a living being, an organism with lungs and responsibilities and the faculty for being affected. Would-be parents should ascertain whether or not they are undertaking the dissemination of disease and crime among future generations. For society not to know, nor care to know, and not to determine, nor care to determine, the character of purposed contributions to a new generation, would seem amazing, were we not born looking upon it. Were we accustomed to accomplished and scientific procreation, our indiscriminate somnambulism would scarce wear the aspects of sanity.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Race Culture, p. 238–239

Universe , Future , Parent , Disease

“The purpose of all penal schemes should be, not reciprocity, but reformation pure and simple; not the relentless and absurd infliction of misery commensurate with the crimes committed, but the achievement of the largest possible reformation with the gentlest and most strategic deprivation.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), Race Culture, pp. 221–222

“Disease is contagious, and death an unavoidable necessity. Pleasure is often exhausting, and life is everywhere interpolated with pain. Droughts, darknesses, floods, pestilences, storms, and scourges harrow the earth from one pole of it to the other. The earth is, and always has been, peopled by deformities—creatures so defective in their natures that they visit upon each other without hesitancy crimes and barbarities of the most horrible hue. These wretches are compelled to pass their lives in the midst of a universe so mysterious and mighty that the most arrogant of us are helpless in the crash and melee of its tendencies. Yet human contemplators look out over this dark and contentious chaos and declare it to be without spot or blemish.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Source: Better-World Philosophy: A Sociological Synthesis (1899), The Social Problem, pp. 87–88

Pain , People , Nature , Pleasure

“Is murder stripped of its blackness by become a fine art? All assassination is practically instantaneous and painless, the assassination of men as as well as that of birds and quadrupeds. What would the author of such nonsense think if the assassination of his brother or mother blandly attempted to relieve himself of all guilt by means of the assurance that his victim had experienced no suffering? The crime of extermination does not consist in the creation of pain, but in the destruction of that precious and mysterious essence called life.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

Debate with Laurence Gronlund, quoted by Karen Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo in Vegetarian America: A History (2004), p. 121

Pain , Suffering , Art , Bird

“WikiLeaks and Assange have done more to expose the dark machinations and crimes of the American Empire than any other news organization. Assange, in addition to exposing atrocities and crimes committed by the United States military in our endless wars and revealing the inner workings of the Clinton campaign, made public the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency, their surveillance programs and their interference in foreign elections…And WikiLeaks worked swiftly to save Edward Snowden, who exposed the wholesale surveillance of the American public by the government, from extradition to the United States by helping him flee from Hong Kong to Moscow…”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

"Crucifying Julian Assange" (2018)

War , Help

“The police confront dangers and social miseries of a kind most of us can only imagine. They deal with the waste products of a competitive corporate society: the ill-fed, the ill-housed, the desperate, and the defeated. The slums are not the problem, they are the solution; they are the way capitalism deals with the surplus people of a market economy. And for all they cost the taxpayer in crime, police and welfare, the slums remain a source of profit for certain speculators, arsonists, realtors, big merchants, and others.”

Michael Parenti (1933) American academic

Source: Democracy for the Few (2010 [1974]), sixth edition, Chapter 8

Imagination , Housing , People , Problem

“We must not forget that the world needs to be fed. France and Germany, for example, use more than 50% of their territories for agriculture, while Brazil only uses 8% of its land for food production. 61% of our territory is preserved! Our policy is zero tolerance for crime, including environmental crimes. I reiterate that any initiative to help or support the preservation of the Amazon rainforest, or other biomes, must be treated in full respect of Brazilian sovereignty. We also reject attempts to instrumentalize environmental issues or indigenous policy in favor of foreign political and economic interests, especially those disguised as good intentions. We are ready to harness our full potential sustainably through partnerships and added value.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

Speech at the at the 74th UN General Assembly. Statement by Mr. Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of the Federative Republic of Brazil http://statements.unmeetings.org/GA74/BR_EN.pdf. United Nations PaperSmart (24 September 2019).

Partnership , Food , Support , Forgetting

Quotes about crime page 14

Quotes about crime
page 14