Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Porter, O. Henry

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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.

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

Huston, John

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

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

Capone, Al

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

Shaw, George Bernard

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

12.

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

13.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

14.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

15.

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

Winner, Michael

16.

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

Proverb, French

17.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

18.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

19.

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

20.

Crime expands according to our willingness to put up with it.

Farber, Barry J.

21.

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

Kraus, Karl

22.

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

23.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

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

Plato

29.

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself. All that you despise, all that you loathe, all that you reject, all that you condemn and seek to convert by punishment springs from you.

Miller, Henry

30.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

31.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

32.

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

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

35.

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

Meredith, Owen

36.

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

Rabelais, Francois

37.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

38.

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

Will, George F.

39.

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

Adler, Freda

40.

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

Peterson, Jill

41.

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

42.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

43.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

44.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

49.

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.

50.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil