“Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes”
“Abscond. To ''move'' in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.”
“My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way.”
“A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.”
“The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.”
“Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.”
“The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.”
“A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.”
“Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.”
“He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, him not know t, and he's not robbed at all.”
“Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.”
“There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.”
“We may live without friends; we may live without books. But civilized men cannot live without cooks.”
“There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.”
“He 63 ways of getting money, the most common, most honorable ones being staling, thieving, and robbing.”
“Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”
“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”
“Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.”
“Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.”
“The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.”
“We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.”
“Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.”
“Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is also true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.”
“The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.”
“Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.”
“A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.”
“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.”
“He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then when the sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was orphan.”
“Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.”
“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.”