Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

Shaw, George Bernard

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

Hazlitt, William

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

We are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

Horace

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

10.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

11.

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.

Twain, Mark

12.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

13.

The truth of the matter is that muggers are very interesting people.

Winner, Michael

14.

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

15.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

16.

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

Adler, Freda

17.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

18.

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

19.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

20.

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

Proverb, French

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.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Shakespeare, William

26.

The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness.

Canetti, Elias

27.

My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they're going to stay that way.

Capone, Al

28.

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

29.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

30.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

Peterson, Jill

32.

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

33.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

Genet, Jean

34.

It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.

Sade, Marquis De

35.

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

36.

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

Will, George F.

37.

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

Scott, Howard

38.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Farber, Barry J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Connolly, Cyril

45.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

46.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

49.

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

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo