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Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit. (Baden Michael)
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one consider that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies. (Baden Michael)
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. (Baden Michael)
Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal. (Baden Michael)
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Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us. (Baden Michael)
The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague. (Baden Michael)
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event. (Baden Michael)
If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father. (Baden Michael)
For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium. (Baden Michael)
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. (Baden Michael)
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. (Baden Michael)
Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium. (Baden Michael)
One crime is everything, two is nothing. (Baden Michael)
The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged. (Baden Michael)
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society. (Baden Michael)
Successful crimes alone are justified. (Baden Michael)
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. (Baden Michael)
We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization. (Baden Michael)
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it. (Baden Michael)
Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. (Baden Michael)
Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it. (Baden Michael)
Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards. (Baden Michael)
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. (Baden Michael)
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. (Baden Michael)
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. (Baden Michael)
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