Laws and crimes - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

''We do without the lawyers, certainly,'' was Doctor Leete's reply. ''It would not seem reasonable to us, in a case where the only interest of the nation is to find out the truth, that persons should take part in the proceedings who had an acknowledged motive to color it.''

- Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888)

In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.

- Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1917)

Freedom and crime are linked as indivisibly as . . . well, as the motion of the aero and its speed: when its speed equals zero, it does not move; when man's freedom equals zero, he commits no crimes. That is clear. The only means of ridding man of crime is ridding him of freedom.

- Yevgeny Zamiatin, We (1924), translated by Mirra Ginsburg (1972)

Which is more important - to punish criminals or to end crime?

- Fredric Brown, ''Crisis, 1999'' (1949)

Public Officers must at all times remember that the criminal is merely a person at odds with his society. [. . .] The criminal must make amends for the results of his crime, and this might be called punishment, but the chief duty of the police is to see that he is brought in for therapy. A criminal cured is a citizen saved.

- Kendell Foster Crossen, ''Public Enemy'' (1952)

''The rules!'' shouted Ralph, ''you're breaking the rules!'' ''Who cares?'' Ralph summoned his wits. ''Because the rules are the only thing we've got!''

- William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)

I don't hold with the idea that to understand all is to forgive all; you follow that and first thing you know you're sentimental over murderers and rapists and kidnappers and forgetting their victims. That's wrong.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit - Will Travel (1958)

The laws of society are what makes something a crime or not a crime.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round the earth like it might be midges round a lamp, and there's not no attention paid to earthy law nor order no more.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens. You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment.

- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws - always for other fellow. A murky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up.

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)

We live in a universe of murderers.

- Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, The Ganymede Takeover (1967)

There are very few successful thieves in this world. Still less on the other five. The will to steal is an impulse towards the absurd and the tasteless. (The talents are poetic, theatrical, a certain reverse charisma . . .) But it is a will, as the will to order, power, love.

- Samuel R. Delany, ''Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones'' (1969)

If it's all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it's himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do it over, and over, and over.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''TheWord forWorld Is Forest'' (1972)

Every impossible rule has its loopholes; every general prohibition creates its bootleggers.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (1973)

Some people love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It's men who make laws, and enforce them, and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore them.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''The New Atlantis'' (1975)

The street finds its own uses for things.

- William Gibson, ''Burning Chrome'' (1982)

He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the interzone where art wasn't quite crime, crime not quite art.

- William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

Jungle law is an accumulation of practical behaviours. Beasts of a dozen species gather at sundown at the waterhole, each in its protective group, without conflict or fear; by day, predators and prey congregate in view of each other until the moment comes for just one to be cut out and killed. There is order, understood.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

It is almost impossible for anyone to be in a street without breaking the law.

- Terry Pratchett,Men at Arms (1993)

United Earth is a collection of nations whose concept of justice is a game of lawyers. A jury does not decide who is right and who has been wrong, but whose lawyer better played the game. Truth never enters into it.

- R. M. Meluch, ''Traitor'' (1995)

That's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em.

- Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time (2001)