Crime and Punishment Quotes

It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong.

This is the law: blood spilt upon the ground cries out for more.

Nothing corrupts a man so much as being an arm of the law and making men suffer.

The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

The law condemns and punishes only actions within certain definite and narrow limits; it thereby justifies, in a way, all similar actions that lie outside those limits.

There are so many laws that no one is safe from hanging.

Part of my platform is, of course, the guilty must be punished and that we no longer let our children see their guilty leaders getting away with murder. Because it teaches children, you know, that they don’t have to have any morals as long as they have guns and are bullies and I don’t think that's a good message. . . . I do say that I am in favor of the return of the guillotine and that is for the worst of the worst of the guilty.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

While I live, every criminal must die.

I don't know why we need so many more prisons when the crooks seem so happy in the Senate.

The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.

Nothing so upholds the laws as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.

A big moment for me was when I did a play that was a new adaptation of Dostojevskij's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I played Raskolnikov. It was actually the first thing I did when I got out of acting school.

I am obsessed with the whole Victoriana thing, the whole Jack the Ripper London era, the grayness of it, the haunted feeling of it, all ancient and bloody.

An apt and true reply was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride. "What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor."

Any time you take a chance you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk because they can put you away just as fast for a ten dollar heist as they can for a million dollar job.

If you are sentenced to torture for a crime, yes, that is a cruel punishment. But the mere fact that somebody is tortured is - is unlawful under - under our statutes, but the Constitution happens not to address it, just as it does not address a lot of other horrible things.

Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed.

War brings out thieves and peace hangs them.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

The law is a gun, which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits someone else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime.

I don't believe in a lot of things from the Bronze Age, but an eye for an eye does make a sort of symmetrical sense to me. I really believe that if somebody takes a life, that [death penalty] is what they should get. I also think it's a lot more humane than keeping people in a cage for the rest of their life.

I just really like the verve and muscle of good crime fiction, the narrative punch of it. The underlying principle of good crime fiction is an insistence on a kind of root democracy. I've always responded to that notion.