Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Proverb, French

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

Doctorow, E. L.

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

Adler, Freda

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

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

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

10.

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

11.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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)

14.

Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological -- resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

15.

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

Farber, Barry J.

16.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

17.

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

18.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

19.

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

Hazlitt, William

20.

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

Kraus, Karl

21.

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

22.

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

Connolly, Cyril

23.

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

24.

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

25.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

26.

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

Shakespeare, William

27.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

28.

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

Will, George F.

29.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

30.

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

Scott, Howard

31.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

32.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

33.

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

Genet, Jean

34.

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

Horace

35.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

36.

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

37.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

38.

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.

39.

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

Meredith, Owen

40.

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

41.

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

Aristotle

42.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

43.

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

44.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

45.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

50.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish