Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Set a thief to catch a thief.

- Proverb, French

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

Huston, John

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

Plato

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Porter, O. Henry

10.

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

Will, George F.

11.

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

Rabelais, Francois

12.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

13.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

14.

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

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

17.

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

18.

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

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

20.

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

Horace

21.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

22.

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

23.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

24.

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

25.

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

Genet, Jean

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

29.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

30.

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

Connolly, Cyril

31.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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

Scott, Howard

33.

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

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.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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)

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

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

49.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

50.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De