Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Huston, John

Best Quotes about 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

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

Mencken, H. L.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Aristotle

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

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Proverb, French

12.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

13.

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

Porter, O. Henry

14.

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

Huston, John

15.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

16.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

17.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

18.

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

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Will, George F.

23.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

24.

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

25.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

26.

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

27.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

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

Meredith, Owen

29.

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

30.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

31.

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.

32.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

37.

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

Kraus, Karl

38.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

39.

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

Rabelais, Francois

40.

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

41.

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

Connolly, Cyril

42.

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

43.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

44.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

48.

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

49.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

50.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver