Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Crime generally punishes itself.

- Goldsmith, Oliver

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

Huston, John

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

Horace

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

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

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

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

Shakespeare, William

10.

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

Scott, Howard

11.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

12.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

13.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

14.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

15.

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)

16.

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

Plato

17.

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

Adler, Freda

18.

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

Winner, Michael

19.

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.

20.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

21.

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

22.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

23.

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

Hazlitt, William

24.

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

Rabelais, Francois

25.

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

Connolly, Cyril

26.

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

Peterson, Jill

27.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

28.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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.

30.

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

Genet, Jean

31.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Capone, Al

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

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.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

39.

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

40.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

41.

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

Kraus, Karl

42.

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

Proverb, French

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

46.

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

Farber, Barry J.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Aristotle