There was only one guy in the whole Bible Jesus ever personally promised a place with him in Paradise. Not Peter, not Paul, not any of those guys. He was a convicted thief, being executed. So don't knock the guys on death row. Maybe they know something you don't.
Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.
The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character; the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.
Merciful heavens! Human treatment may even render human a man in whom the image of God has long ago been tarnished. It is these 'unfortunates' that must be treated in the most human fashion. This is their salvation and their joy.
There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.
Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category - black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.
When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent criminal began as a relatively benign human being for whom they would probably have more sympathy than antipathy.
Maigret had often tried to get other people, including men of experience, to admit that those who fall, especially those who have a morbid determination to descend ever lower, are almost always idealists.
The perfect criminal, should he or she exist, would be the one who is never apprehended - indeed, the one whose crimes may be huge but unnoticed, or indeed miscategorized not as crimes at all because they are so powerful they sway the law in their favor, or so clever they discover an immoral opportunity for criminal enterprise before the legislators notice it. Such forms of criminality may be indistinguishable, at a distance, from lawful business; the criminal paragon of upper-class virtue, a face-man for Forbes.