Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential.
 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1867). copy citation

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Author Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Source Crime and Punishment
Topic caution failure
Date 1867
Language English
Reference
Note Translated by Constance Garnett
Weblink http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2554/2554-h/2554-h.htm

Context

“He had come gradually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime, as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease, developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the moment of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease.” source