Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Genet, Jean

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

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

Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.

Aristotle

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

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

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

Adler, Freda

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

10.

The greatest crime in the world is not developing your potential. When you do what you do best, you are helping not only yourself, but the world.

Williams, Roger

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Plato

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

Hazlitt, William

16.

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

Shakespeare, William

17.

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

Horace

18.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

19.

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

20.

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

Porter, O. Henry

21.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

22.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

23.

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

24.

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

Huston, John

25.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

26.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

27.

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

Meredith, Owen

28.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is also true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

Kennedy, John F.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Squeeze human nature into the straitjacket of criminal justice and crime will appear.

Kraus, Karl

32.

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

Rabelais, Francois

33.

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

Connolly, Cyril

34.

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

35.

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

Scott, Howard

36.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

37.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

38.

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

39.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

40.

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)

41.

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

Will, George F.

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

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

46.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

47.

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

Capone, Al

48.

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

Farber, Barry J.

49.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.