Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

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

Capone, Al

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

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

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

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

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

10.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

14.

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

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.

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

Rabelais, Francois

17.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

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

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

Plato

25.

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

26.

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

Winner, Michael

27.

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

Scott, Howard

28.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

29.

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

Porter, O. Henry

30.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

31.

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

Peterson, Jill

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

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

Genet, Jean

34.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

35.

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

Huston, John

36.

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

Proverb, French

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

40.

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

Adler, Freda

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

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)

45.

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

46.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

47.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

48.

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

Horace

49.

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

50.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson