Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime.

George, Henry

Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.

Farber, Barry J.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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.

Allen, Woody

He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.

Plato

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.

Camus, Albert

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Huston, John

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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.

Christie, Agatha

10.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Adler, Freda

11.

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost -- the most legitimate -- passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

Sade, Marquis De

12.

There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

A person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.

Scott, Howard

14.

If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.

La Bruyere, Jean De

15.

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.

Genet, Jean

16.

Want of money and the distress of a thief can never be alleged as the cause of his thieving, for many honest people endure greater hardships with fortitude. We must therefore seek the cause elsewhere than in want of money, for that is the miser's passion, not the thief s.

Blake, William

17.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

18.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know't, and he's notrobbed at all

Shakespeare, William

20.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

21.

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

Wells, H.G.

22.

There is a new billboard outside Time Square. It keeps an up-to minute count of gun-related crimes in New York. Some goofball is going to shoot someone just to see the numbers move.

Letterman, David

23.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

Abscond. To move in a mysterious way, commonly with the property of another.

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

Save a thief from the gallows and he will cut your throat.

Proverb, French

26.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

27.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.

Ellis, Havelock

28.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Miller, Henry

29.

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

Doctorow, E. L.

30.

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

He has 63 ways of getting money, the most common and most honorable ones being stealing, thieving, and robbing.

Rabelais, Francois

32.

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.

Foucault, Michel

33.

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.

Durkheim, Emile

34.

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

Falcone, Giovanni

35.

A burglar who respects his art always takes his time before taking anything else.

Porter, O. Henry

36.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

37.

Slums may well be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.

Connolly, Cyril

38.

He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then when the sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was orphan.

Lincoln, Abraham

39.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

40.

We may live without friends; we may live without books. But civilized men cannot live without cooks.

Meredith, Owen

41.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

42.

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

Butler, Samuel

43.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

44.

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.

Bataille, Georges

45.

Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes

Will, George F.

46.

Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.

Juvenal, (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

47.

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.

Arendt, Hannah

48.

Many a man is saved from being a thief by finding everything locked up.

Howe, Edgar Watson

49.

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.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

50.

It is because they took the easy way out that rivers, and people, go crooked.

Peterson, Jill