Criminal Law Quotes

Criminal Law Quotes by George Bernard Shaw, Sue Grafton, Robert Kennedy, Martha Minow, Louis D. Brandeis, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw
My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.
Sue Grafton
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
Robert Kennedy
I see, from my vantage point as the vice-chair of the Legal Services Corporation, a serious crisis going on in this country. Eighty percent of low-income people have no access to the civil justice system, meaning anything but criminal law.
Martha Minow
To declare that in the administration of criminal law the end justifies the means to declare that the Government may commit crimes in order to secure conviction of a private criminal would bring terrible retribution.
Louis D. Brandeis
The purpose of criminal law is to punish the enemies of those in power.
Friedrich Nietzsche
There are certain irregularities which are not the subject of criminal law. But when the criminal law happens to be auxiliary to the law of morality, I do not feel any inclination to explain it away.
Sherrilyn Kenyon
My father is a practicing criminal law attorney in the Seattle area.
David Guterson
Obviously if you are an accountant, a criminal lawyer, a president, or a senator, or if you work in a funeral parlor, you have to wear a tie, but more and more people are wearing very casual clothes.
Jean Pigozzi
Criminal law has to do with relations between the misbehaving individual and his government…Criminal law establishes rules of conduct; their breach, if prosecuted and conviction follows, results in punishment.
Lawrence M. Friedman
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.
Mark Twain
The courts used to be, fair and square, the avengers of secular crimes; but nowadays they demand respect even for the criminal.
Franz Grillparzer
Protecting life is a value that matters. Whether it is stopping partial birth abortion which I think is a barbarism. Or whether it is fairly enforcing the criminal laws against Planned Parenthood.
Ted Cruz
I would strongly recommend any young man to stay away from criminal law. It’s not a good place to be, unfortunately.
F. Lee Bailey
It is the policy of the United States not to engage in torture, and there are federal criminal laws that prohibit torture.
John Yoo
Criminal law is one of the few professions where the client buys someone else‘s luck. The luck of most people is strictly non-transferrable. But a good criminal lawyer can sell all his luck to a client, and the more luck he sells the more he has to sell.
William S. Burroughs
The criminal law needs to be improved to meet new forms of crime, but to denounce financial devices which are useful and legitimate because use is made of them for fraud, is ridiculous and unworthy of the age in which we live.
William Graham Sumner
I’ve always been tremendously interested in criminal law. It goes to a deep interest I have in prisons and the criminal element, and what we do as a society with it. I’ve always been touched by the idea of criminality.
Elizabeth Strout
As long as I’m sitting in the chair, there’s not going to be any Jew appointed to that court. No Jew can be right on the criminal-law issue.
Richard M. Nixon
Crime is contagious….if the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.
Louis D. Brandeis
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
Ayn Rand
As one reads history … one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.
Oscar Wilde
A community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurence of crime.
Oscar Wilde
The great and constant need of those who investigate homicide and practice forensic pathology or criminal law is a warm humanism.
Ramsey Clark
While teaching, I also worked undercover in the lower courts by saying I was a young law teacher wanting experience in criminal law. The judges were happy to assist me but what I learned was how corrupt the lower courts were. Judges were accepting money right in the courtroom.
Samuel Dash
Political economy regards the proletarian like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.
Karl Marx
It’s funny that they’ve called homosexuality a crime… At this rate, everyone will be a criminal.
Kangana Ran
aut
Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim – when he defends himself – as a criminal.
Frederic Bastiat
I threw my whole life and lived my life in a certain way to make sure that I would never violate any law.. certainly never any criminal laws.. and always maintained that most important to me was my integrity, was my character, were my values.
Kenneth Lay
If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.
Thomas Szasz