Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Horace

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

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

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

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)

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Porter, O. Henry

10.

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

Rabelais, Francois

11.

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

12.

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

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

14.

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

15.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

16.

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

Huston, John

17.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

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

Peterson, Jill

20.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

21.

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

Proverb, French

22.

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

23.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

24.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

25.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

26.

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

27.

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

28.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

29.

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

Adler, Freda

30.

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

Plato

31.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

32.

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

33.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

34.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

35.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

36.

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

37.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

38.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

39.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

40.

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

41.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

42.

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.

43.

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

Will, George F.

44.

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

Mencken, H. L.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

49.

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