Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Doctorow, E. L.

Best Quotes about 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

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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

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

Winner, Michael

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

10.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

11.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

12.

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

Connolly, Cyril

13.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

14.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

15.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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.

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

18.

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

Adler, Freda

19.

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

20.

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

Mencken, H. L.

21.

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

Rabelais, Francois

22.

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

23.

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

Kraus, Karl

24.

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

Proverb, French

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Horace

28.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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

35.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

36.

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

Peterson, Jill

37.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

38.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

39.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

40.

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

Will, George F.

41.

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

42.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

43.

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

44.

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

Meredith, Owen

45.

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

Aristotle

46.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

47.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

48.

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

Porter, O. Henry

49.

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.

50.

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