Crime And Punishment Quotes

In fact, whenever I read something as complicated as Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and think about his having written it in longhand, I am not merely awed - the thought gives me a headache. ~ Thomas B. Sawyer

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days ... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.' ~ Paul Auster

I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic. ~ Arthur Smith

They weren't on a yacht that was devoured by a hurricane. Yet they vanished. They weren't in a private plane that dropped off the radar in a remote area. Yet they vanished. They're home wasn't washed away in a flood, they weren't on the run from the law and didn't owe the mafia a bunch of money but they vanished, without reason and without a trace.
The Prophet of Life From The Family That Vanished ~ The Prophet Of Life

Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think, is the best definition of him. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When reason fails, the devil helps! ~ Markus Zusak

And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect. ~ Herman Koch

Any immigrants found guilty of serious crime – rape, murder, violent gang membership – should be sent straight back to their country of origin.
That ought to act as a deterrent. If they choose to bite the hand that feeds them, then they can fuck off. We don't need people like that in this country. ~ Karl Wiggins

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime. ~ Boris Pasternak

Let someone who was not from among the convicts try reproaching a prisoner for his crime and abusing him (though it's not in the Russian spirit to reproach a criminal)
there would be no end of cursing. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Reign of Terror: A Story of Crime and Punishment told of two brothers, a career criminal and a small-time crook, in prison together and in love with the same girl. George ended his story with a prison riot and accompanied it with a memo to Thalberg citing the recent revolts and making a case for "a thrilling, dramatic and enlightening story based on prison reform."

---

Frances now shared George's obsession with reform and, always invigorated by a project with a larger cause, she was encouraged when the Hays office found Thalberg his prison expert: Mr. P. W. Garrett, the general secretary of the National Society of Penal Information. Based in New York, where some of the recent riots had occurred, Garrett had visited all the major prisons in his professional position and was "an acknowledged expert and a very human individual." He agreed to come to California to work with Frances for several weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas for a total of kr 4,470.62 plus expenses. Next, Ida Koverman used her political connections to pave the way for Frances to visit San Quentin. Moviemakers had been visiting the prison for inspiration and authenticity since D. W. Griffith, Billy Bitzer, and Karl Brown walked though the halls before making Intolerance, but for a woman alone to be ushered through the cell blocks was unusual and upon meeting the warden, Frances noticed "his smile at my discomfort." Warden James Hoolihan started testing her right away by inviting ~ Cari Beauchamp

I think there really is no other way to write a long, serious
novel. You work, shelve it for a while, work, shelve it again,
work some more, month after month, year after year, and then
one day you read the whole piece through and, so far as you
can see, there are no mistakes. (The minute it's published and
you read the printed book you see a thousand.) This tortuous
process is not necessary, I suspect, for the writing of a popular
novel in which the characters are not meant to have depth and complexity, where character A is consistently stingy and character
B is consistently openhearted and nobody is a mass of
contradictions, as are real human beings. But for a true novel
there is generally no substitute for slow, slow baking.
We've all heard the stories of Tolstoy's pains over Anna Karenina,
Jane Austen's over Emma, or even Dostoevsky's over Crime and Punishment, a novel he grieved at having to publish prematurely,though he had worked at it much longer than most popular-fiction writers work at their novels. ~ John Gardner

Even Mademoiselle Neubahr can't make me believe in hell. It doesn't seem a very - witty - solution of the crime-and-punishment situation, does it? ~ Frances Noyes Hart

The offender must be able to give something back. But criminals are most often poor people. They have nothing to give. The answers to this are many. It is correct that our prisons are by and large filled with poor people. We let the poor pay with the only commodity that is close to being equally distributed in society: time. ~ Nils Christie

Dark windows are often a very clear proof. ~ Bill Vaughan

Crime? What crime? ... My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman ... and you call that a crime? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.
There's Heaven then there's Hell niggas
One day your cruisin' in your seven,
Next day your sweatin', forgettin' your lies,
Alibis ain't matchin' up, bullshit catchin' up
Hit with the RICO, they repoed your vehicle
Everything was all good just a week ago
'Bout to start bitchin' ain't you?
Ready to start snitchin' ain't you?
I forgive you. Weak ass, hustlin' just ain't you
Aside from the fast cars
Honeys that shake they ass in bars
You know you wouldn't be involved
With the Underworld dealers, carriers of mac-millers
East coast bodiers, West coast cap-peelers
Little monkey niggas turned gorillas. ~ Jay-Z

Life [had] replaced logic. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is not a question of crime and punishment
it is problem and solution. ~ Rohinton Mistry

Every transgression and disobedience receives a just recompense of reward, except with those who truly love themselves. ~ Auliq Ice

Any time you look into the face of a man you must realize you have a 100% chance of looking into the face of a rapist. You must realize you are looking into the face of a man who will kill. It does not matter if this man is your father, brother, cousin, uncle or grandfather, or whether the man is a neighbor, coworker, a uniform police officer or a fireman. We do not care if the man is White; the young and White kill as often and with as much frequency as the old and Black. Nothing precludes a man from being a rapist. Nothing! Any time you look into the face of a man you must realize you have a 100% chance of looking into the face of a rapist. This is a life saving assumption. To think counter to this assumption is to put your life in that man's hands. Accepting this fact may save your life or you may avoid being raped. ~ Gloria G.Lee

He is the thief man who steals away your youth in the middle of the night. He is the evil whose shadow engenders fear in rural areas. He is the bogyman who keeps children up at night. He is the terrorist who claims to be enforcing the Ten Commandments while he breaks most of them.
The Prophet of Life From: The Most Notorious Serial Killer You've Likely Never Heard of i ~ The Prophet Of Life

It was slightly after midnight. Hundreds of people were at a movie theater watching the midnight showing of the opening day of the new Batman movie. Suddenly a man appeared from a side entrance. He was dressed in battle gear and appeared to have a gun. A few patrons were concerned. Many others thought he was part of a promotion for the film. Most of the crowd didn't notice him.
The Prophet of Life From: Midnight Movie Massacre ~ The Prophet Of Life

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. ~ Paul Gallico

We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. ~ Albert Camus

Around the age of seven I wrote a play. The protagonist was a giant; the theme was crime and punishment; the crime was lying, as befits a future novelist; the punishment was being squashed to death by the moon.
...This play was not a raging success. As I recall, my brother and his pals came in and laughed at it, thus giving me an early experience of literary criticism. ~ Margaret Atwood

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating. ~ Michel Foucault

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness. ~ Aristotle.

Build the prisons and they will commit the crimes. ~ Brian Spellman

This woman goes into a gun shop and says, 'I want to buy a gun for my husband.' The clerk says, 'Did he tell you what kind of gun?' 'No,' she replied. 'He doesn't even know I'm going to shoot him. ~ Phyllis Diller

If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair. ~ Brian Spellman

I get it. I haven't seen much of the real world yet. But let's say I do get out there ... and it turns out that it's not even worth seeing? Or even worse.. what if it's so ugly and cruel that I can barely stand to look? What if I only meet idiots and the depraved? What's that going to teach me? What can I learn from that? ~ Naoyuki Ochiai

It's a free country." Inmates once bought this. That's why they're inmates. ~ Brian Spellman

Mathias remembered that once when he was a boy, he'd gone up to a pile of red apples that lay in the market cart, in the market near Stolberg where his father often took him. He'd always loved apples, and he couldn't resist the temptation of grabbing one out of the pile. He chose the closest, a splendid red piece of fruit that he would never forget because of his overwhelming desire to take it and hide it in the folds of his clothing. A moment after Mathias reached out and snatched it, the pile slid and applies tumbled down all around him. The farmer, who knew his father, would have been satisfied with an apology. But his father, a successful craftsman who was well-known and respected in the town, had insisted on purchasing an entire basketful of apples, because of the trouble Mathias had caused. Mathias got the worst scolding his father had ever given him. Not because of the money, but for the small act of petty thievery, which an upright man like his father would never tolerate. He shouldered his punishment, and in the end was only allowed to eat as single apple from the basket. He spent the night thinking about the pile. He had to remove only one and the whole thing had come down. He wondered if the same thing might happen with any tower, no matter how majestic and imposing it might seem, were someone to remove the right stone from the base.

The thought stayed with him throughout his life. Venice now seemed a lot like that pile of apples. If three murders truly ~ Riccardo Bruni

You see I kept asking myself then: why am I so stupid that if others are stupid - and I know they are - yet I won't be wiser? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. ~ Jackson Burnett

She said nothing, she only looked at me without a word. But it hurts more, it hurts more when they don't blame! ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

All is in a man's hands and he lets it all slip from cowardice, that's an axiom. It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of. Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most ... . ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I just can't imagine my life without Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. I can spin off of that and talk about Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy. I could talk about other novels, but for me it's Dostoevsky. His sheer size and grandeur, his sacramentality, his ecclesiology, and his sense of the human predicament are as powerful as it gets. Can't imagine not reading the Russians. ~ Gordon T. Smith

The fact that I had killed a man was really putting a crimp in my love
life.
Well, okay, to be strictly accurate, I hadn't killed him. But I had
helped. And I had watched enough of the Emmy Award-winning cops-andlawyers
drama Crime and Punishment on TV to know that cops weren't very
understanding about that sort of thing. I had even auditioned for the
role of a murderess in a C&P episode the previous year, but I didn't get
the part. So, since I had never even played a killer, actually being one
now was something of a novelty. ~ Laura Resnick

A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo's scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his statue of David. Think of a great and enduring novel like Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment. Think of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Shakespeare's Henry V. Think of a beautifully designed building, like the masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You can't point to any one single item that makes the whole thing work; it's the entire work - all the pieces working together to create an overall effect - that leads to enduring greatness. ~ John C. Maxwell

My father gave me Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment' when I was in junior high; my junior high, angst-filled soul responded to that. ~ Janet Fitch

I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I don't consider myself above the law, I consider myself above the principles.

~ Aarush Kashyap ~ Kirtida Gautam

A strange idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg, and very, very much absorbed him. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If he believed in the full complement of evil in himself, he had to believe also in a natural compulsion to express it. He found himself wondering, therefore, from time to time, if he might have enjoyed his crime in some way, derived some primal satisfaction from it - how else could one really explain in mankind the continued toleration of wars, the perennial enthusiasm for wars when they came, if not for some primal pleasure in killing? - and because the capacity to wonder came so often, he accepted it as true that he had. ~ Patricia Highsmith

Moreover, in the system of criminal punishment in the libertarian world, the emphasis would never be, as it is now, on "society's" jailing the criminal; the emphasis would necessarily be on compelling the criminal to make restitution to the victim of his crime. The present system, in which the victim is not recompensed but instead has to pay taxes to support the incarceration of his own attacker - would be evident nonsense in a world that focuses on the defense of property rights and therefore on the victim of crime. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.' ~ Charlie Trotter

" You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth." --Crime and punishment, F. Dostoevsky ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He's bound to have done something, Nobby repeated.
In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done. ~ Terry Pratchett

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation. ~ Claude Levi-Strauss

If in my fight I can encourage even some people to understand and to abandon policies they now so blindly follow, I shall not regret any punishment I may incur. ~ Bram Fischer

Ernst Dwinger in his Siberian Diary
mentions a German lieutenant - for years a prisoner in a camp where cold and hunger were almost
unbearable - who constructed himself a silent piano with wooden keys. In the most abject misery,
perpetually surrounded by a ragged mob, he composed a strange music which was audible to him alone.
And for us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished
beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection
which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity. ~ Albert Camus

But he alone having reached our deep corruption, he alone having taken upon himself our labors, he alone having suffered the punishments due for our impieties, having recovered us who were not half dead merely, but were already in tombs and sepulchers, and altogether foul and offensive, saves us, both anciently and now, by his beneficent zeal, beyond the expectation of any one, even of ourselves, and imparts liberally of the Father's benefits - he who is the giver of life and light, our great Physician and King and Lord, the Christ of God. ~ Eusebius

I wished Adam weren't jumping in for his turn.
Because watching Adam wakeboard was not relaxing. He wasn't careful when wakeboarding. Or in general. He was the opposite of careful. His life was one big episode of Jackass. He would do anything on a dare, so the older boys dared him a lot. My role in this game was to run and tell their mom. If I'd been able to run faster when we were kids, I might have saved Adam from a broken arm, several cracked ribs, and a couple of snake bites.
Knowing this, it might not make a lot of sense that Mr. Vader let us wakeboard for the marina. But we'd come to wakeboarding only gradually. When we first started out, it was more like, Look at the very young children on water skis! How adorable. One time the local newspaper ran a photo of me and Adam waterskiing double, each of us holding up an American flag. It's okay for you to gag now. I can take it.
But Mr. Vader was no fool. He understood things changed. After the second time Adam broke his collarbone, Mr. Vader put us under strict orders not to get hurt, because it was bad for business. Customers might not be so eager to buy a wakeboard and all the equipment if they witnessed our watery death. To enforce this rule, the punishment for bleeding in the boat was that we had to clean the boat. Adam cleaned the boat a lot last summer. ~ Jennifer Echols

Do not make your current partner pay for the crimes and misdemeanors of your previous partners. ~ Amy Dickinson

When you stand and overcome a significant setback, you'll find an increasing inner confidence and self-assurance that has been created by conquering defeat. Absorbing and overcoming this kind of punishment engenders a sober, steely toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence and a personal belief that you can take on anything, survive and win. ~ Bill Walsh

Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?" Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. "This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problems with you, but don't make the mistake of bothering me. ~ John Kennedy Toole

A majority of the crime in the downtown is property crime. There have been a few larcenies and burglaries, but robberies and assaults are not common in the downtown. There isn't usually any violent crime. ~ Greg Smith

In Connecticut, for example, a man confessed to having had sexual relations with a variety of animals since the age of ten; Massachusetts executed several teenage boys for buggery. Sexual relations with animals required harsh punishment, for colonists believed that these unions could have reproductive consequences. The mating of humans and animals, they feared, would produce monstrous offspring. For this reason, colonists insisted on punishing not only the man but also the beast, who might bear such monsters. ~ John D'Emilio

Most of those who could have done something to prevent the crime and did not consoled themselves with the pretext that affairs of honor are sacred monopolies, giving access only to those who are part of the drama. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Violating the 4th Amendment guarantees against illegal searches and seizures is not the way to solve crime problems. ~ Tim Wise

In addition, to punishing sexual offenders and protecting our children, we must also provide services, resources and counseling to the people who are victims of these horrible crimes. ~ Jim Costa

Shower while there were two dead bodies in the bathtub, and he was sane. He drilled holes in the heads of living people to make them his unresisting companions, and he was sane. He ate a bicep which he fried in a skillet, tenderised and sprinkled with sauce, and he was sane. For hours he lay with corpses, hugging them, cherishing them, and he was sane. He kept eleven assorted heads and skulls, and two complete skeletons, for eventual use in a home-made temple, and he was sane. ~ Brian Masters

Moral freedom now reigns. Materialism and the breakdown of the family are epidemic. Abortions, sexual evils, drugs, and crime are rampant. ~ John F. MacArthur Jr.

It's goddamned funny in this police racket how an old woman can look out of a window and see a guy running and pick him out of a line-up six months later, but we can show hotel help a clear photo and they just can't be sure.'
'That's one of the qualifications for good hotel help,' I said. ~ Raymond Chandler

I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels. ~ Maj Sjowall

What made Guantanamo such a travesty - and what still makes it such - is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime. ~ Glenn Greenwald

We have a few chicken-shit senators who are afraid of the NRA and its ilk, but with the right tweaks, I still think you have a shot . . . ~ Mark M. Bello

In Buddhism, being intelligent and inquisitive is not a crime. It is also not a question of being either exclusively intellectual or exclusively devoted, with-we hope-lots of blissful experiences. There is nobody but ourselves to restrict the range of skillful means that we may beneficially apply as practitioners. Being skillful as well as developing higher insight and wisdom are certainly two major focuses on the Buddhist path, and both obviously require some intelligence and refined mental activity. ~ Karl Brunnholzl

I was wrong. I knew I was wrong, and yet I persisted. If that is possible of any explanation it is this: From the day I left my father my lines had been cast, or I cast them myself, among crooked people. I had not spent one hour in the company of an honest person. I had lived in an atmosphere of larceny, theft, crime. I thought in terms of theft. Houses were built to be burglarized, citizens were to be robbed, police to be avoided and hated, stool pigeons to be chastised, and thieves to be cultivated and protected. That was my code; the code of my companions. That was the atmosphere I breathed. 'If you live with wolves, you will learn to howl. ~ Jack Black

I regard marriage as a sin and propagation of children as a crime. It is my conviction also that he is a fool, and still more a sinner, who takes upon himself the yoke of marriage - a fool, because he thereby throws away his freedom, without gaining a corresponding recompense; a sinner, because he gives life to children, without being able to give them the certainty of happiness. I despise humanity in all its strata; I foresee that our posterity will be far more unhappy than we are; and should not I be a sinner, if, in spite of this insight, I should take care to leave a posterity of unhappy beings behind me? The whole of life is the greatest insanity. And if for eighty years one strives and inquiries, still one is obliged finally to confess that he has striven for nothing and has found nothing. Did we at least know why we are in this world! But to the thinker, everything is and remains a riddle; and the greatest good luck is that of being born a flathead. ~ Alexander Von Humboldt

And briefly and succinctly, he put Miss Marple's theory of the crime before the doctor, ending up with her final suggestion. ~ Agatha Christie

Join us. Play the game. It will bring you an untold number of rewards and you will finally have some direction and purpose in your lives. Take control of yourselves and those around you. Bend them to your will and all worldly pleasures will be yours ... ~ Martin Hopkins

All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride. ~ Sophocles

Men commit murder and all sorts of mayhem, in a few years they're back on the streets. Highway robbery and white collar crime, and they laugh at the system they beat. ~ Waylon Jennings

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement. ~ Robert Trivers

There was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth ... there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations ~ Mark Twain

Jimmy Sadd is the most evil man I've ever known. I mean really evil. I'm not talking about tough, or cruel – all the bosses are tough and cruel. You'll never get anywhere in our world if you're not respected. But Jimmy ... God damn, Bruno, getting involved with Sadd ... I'd rather do a deal with the devil himself. Sadd is worse. You'll never get out."

George Hanson
In The Shadow of Sadd. ~ Steen Langstrup

The first teacher, the first kiss, and the first crime. I've always been hindered by my dislike for repetition. The first time you do anything, it's creative, but from then on it's just work. ~ Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

Thistle flashes a wicked smile. "Oh, you haven't heard that one? The government struck a bargain with a cannibal, and they use him to dispose of bodies after executions."
"Who told you that story" I ask, trying to sound casual.
"The supermax prisoners use it to scare each other up in Huntsville. Better watch your step or a man from the government will come and eat you." She shrugs. "It doesn't make much sense, but conspiracy theories never do."
"Right. It's probably bullshit."
Thistle laughs. "Probably?"
"Definitely bullshit," I clarify. Then I take another bite out of Nigel Boyd's thigh. ~ Jack Heath

There is something about big cities that turns me on, and for whatever mysterious reason, places like New York and Paris inspire me. I think it's because cities represent civilization, and as crime-ridden and broken down as some of them are, it's still better than skipping through a meadow. ~ Woody Allen

I met this boy here who I knew as a kid and his mum left him with a pedophile for two weeks when he was eight years old and I'm presuming you know everything there is to know about Jonah's father, and that my father is dead, and my mother hasn't been around for years, and God knows Jessa's real story. So what I'm saying here, Sergeant, is that we're just a tad low on the reliable adult quota so you have no right to be all self-righteous about what Chaz did and if you're going to go around not talking to him when his only crime was wanting me to have what he has, then I think you're going to turn out to be a bit of a dud and you know something? I'm just a bit over life's little disappointments right now. Do you understand what I'm saying? ~ Melina Marchetta

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day. ~ Andrew Marvell

The words witch and witchcraft, in everyday usage for over a thousand years, have undergone several changes of meaning; and today witchcraft, having reverted to its original connotation of magic and sorcery, does not convey the precise and limited definition it once had during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If witchcraft had never meant anything more than the craft of "an old, weather-beaten crone..." Europe would not have suffered, for three centuries from 1450 to 1750, the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and the deepest shame of western civilization, the blackout of everything that homo sapiens, the reasoning man, has ever upheld. This book is about that shame...degradation stifled decency, the filthiest passions masqueraded under the cover of religion, and man's intellect was subverted to condone bestialities that even Swift's Yahoos would blush.

Never were so many wrong, so long... ~ Rossell Hope Robbins

We're the blue line, sir, and that will resonate on-screen. But Peabody is the face, the very human element. And she would symbolize who we are, contrast sharply against what Renee Oberman is."
He rubbed his chin, and his lips curved a little above his fingers. "You can carve out an angle like that, an excellent angle, and believe the idea of your ass in the chair someday down the road is terrifying?" He waved off her response before she could make it. "I should have thought of it myself, should have thought it through exactly that way. I'll contact Furst."
Something inside her unknotted. "Thank you, sir."
"Don't thank me. I'm wondering why I haven't assigned you to Media and PR."
"Because, sir, I hope I've done nothing to deserve that kind of punishment. ~ J.D. Robb

Now everything that you do is written in red or black in Angel Gabriel's book. Not for everyone is this record kept, but only for those who have taken a position of responsibility. There is a Law of Sins, and if you do not fulfil all your obligations, you will pay. ~ G.I. Gurdjieff

L.A.: where there's never weather, and walking is a crime. L.A.: where the streetlights and palm trees go on forever, where darkness never comes, like a deal that never goes down, a meeting that's never taken. The City of Angels: where every cockroach has a screenplay and even the winos wear roller skates. It's that kind of town. ~ Ian Shoales

To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential. ~ Scott Anderson

I'm so sick and tired of people in the media telling us that because of the war, sports aren't important. Fans need sports. We'd have only crime and war to watch on TV if not for sports. ~ Charles Barkley

It was his punishment, to become Blackfeet, to be Piegan. To live on the reservation he'd created, the situation he was already leaving behind. To replace his own life with an Indian one, and thus know firsthand the end result of his policies. An end result generations away from last Winter, just so he could see the scope of what he'd done, that it still had traceable effect. So that, in a sense, he could be inflicting it upon himself.
He nodded, accepted this. ~ Stephen Graham Jones

A world full of people hating themselves is not a happy world. Buddhism does not seem to be about self-punishment. A key buddhist symbol is that of the lotus flower. The lotus flower grows in mud at the bottom of a pool, but rises above the murky water and blooms in the clear air, pure and beautiful, before eventually dying. This metaphor for spiritual enlightenment also works as a metaphor for hope and change. ~ Matt Haig

Someone was coming through the velvet.
He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel's balcony - close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held the sweep of it high, at the level of his gray eyes, which were silver in the shadows.
He was here. He had come.
Arin. ~ Marie Rutkoski

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Bizarre though it is, people seem more inclined to rally around and identify with the victimizer than with the person who has suffered an attack. Eager to distance themselves from the victim position, influenced unconsciously, I suspect, by the pervasive taste for violence that infects our national life, people all too often direct their interest and even their sympathy to the perpetrator of a violent crime rather than to the victim. ~ Natalie Shainess

I believe that whenever you do something right it gives you a little bit of weight so that you come to feel rooted to this earth more solid, secure. Now what scares me is, well sometimes out of nowhere a bad wind blows up. It could be cancer, could be drink, could be some woman who don't belong to you. And despite the weight holding you to the ground, when that wind comes, it picks you up light as a leaf and takes you where it wants. Were in control until were not. Then were helpless. ~ Truman Capote