Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

Proverb, French

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Meredith, Owen

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

Genet, Jean

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

10.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

11.

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

Hazlitt, William

12.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

13.

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

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

16.

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

Scott, Howard

17.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

18.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

19.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Rabelais, Francois

24.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

25.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

26.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

27.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

28.

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

Shakespeare, William

29.

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

Connolly, Cyril

30.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

31.

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

32.

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

Porter, O. Henry

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

Huston, John

35.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

Peterson, Jill

41.

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

Will, George F.

42.

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