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

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

Scott, Howard

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)

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

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

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

10.

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

Genet, Jean

11.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

12.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

13.

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

Capone, Al

14.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

15.

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

Peterson, Jill

16.

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.

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

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

Connolly, Cyril

19.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

20.

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

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

27.

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

Plato

28.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

29.

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

Adler, Freda

30.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Proverb, French

34.

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

35.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

36.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

37.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

38.

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

39.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

40.

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

41.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

42.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

43.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

44.

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