Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

- Farquhar, George

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Porter, O. 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)

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

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.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

10.

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

11.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

12.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

13.

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

14.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

15.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

16.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

17.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

18.

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

Kraus, Karl

19.

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

20.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

26.

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

27.

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

Meredith, Owen

28.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

29.

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

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

32.

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

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.

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

Farber, Barry J.

35.

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

36.

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

Winner, Michael

37.

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

38.

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

Peterson, Jill

39.

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

Capone, Al

40.

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

Scott, Howard

41.

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