Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Farber, Barry J.

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

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

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

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

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

10.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

11.

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

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

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

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

18.

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

Will, George F.

19.

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

Scott, Howard

20.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

21.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

22.

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

23.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

24.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

27.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

28.

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

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

31.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

32.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

33.

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

Rabelais, Francois

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

36.

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

Genet, Jean

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.

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

39.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

40.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

41.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

Proverb, French

43.

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

Shakespeare, William

44.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

45.

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

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

48.

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

Porter, O. Henry

49.

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

50.

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

Peterson, Jill