The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the ''outlaw,'' the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.
The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.
The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people.
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.
There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
There is a new billboard outside Time Square. It keeps an up-to minute count of gun-related crimes in New York. Some goofball is going to shoot someone just to see the numbers move.
There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.
There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes
Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief s.
We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.
We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
We may live without friends; we may live without books. But civilized men cannot live without cooks.
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