Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Aristotle

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

Kraus, Karl

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

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

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

Shakespeare, William

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

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

10.

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

Porter, O. Henry

11.

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

12.

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

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

14.

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

15.

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

16.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

17.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

18.

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

19.

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

Proverb, French

20.

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)

21.

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

Peterson, Jill

22.

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

23.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

24.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

25.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

26.

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.

27.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

28.

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

Meredith, Owen

29.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

36.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

37.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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.

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

Rabelais, Francois

44.

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

45.

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

Capone, Al

46.

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

47.

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

Adler, Freda

48.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

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.

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

Will, George F.