Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Kraus, Karl

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Kraus, Karl

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

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

Peterson, Jill

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

Capone, Al

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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.

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

13.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

14.

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

15.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

16.

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

Plato

17.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

18.

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

Connolly, Cyril

19.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

20.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

26.

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

Scott, Howard

27.

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

Proverb, French

28.

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

Huston, John

29.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

30.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

31.

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

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

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

35.

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

Hazlitt, William

36.

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

37.

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

Meredith, Owen

38.

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.

39.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

40.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

41.

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

Adler, Freda

42.

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)

43.

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

Horace

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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