Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

- Democritus

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

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

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Will, George F.

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

Huston, John

10.

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

11.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

14.

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

Plato

15.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

16.

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

Horace

17.

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

Aristotle

18.

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

Peterson, Jill

19.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

20.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

21.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

22.

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

23.

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

Rabelais, Francois

24.

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.

25.

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

Genet, Jean

26.

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

27.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

28.

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

Winner, Michael

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Kraus, Karl

33.

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

34.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

35.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

36.

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

Connolly, Cyril

37.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

38.

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

Proverb, French

39.

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

40.

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

Capone, Al

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

45.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

46.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

47.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

48.

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