Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Locks keep out only the honest.

- Proverb, Jewish

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

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

Will, George F.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Genet, Jean

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.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

12.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

13.

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

Scott, Howard

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.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

16.

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

Adler, Freda

17.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Porter, O. Henry

26.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

27.

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

28.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

29.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

30.

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

Farber, Barry J.

31.

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

32.

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

Connolly, Cyril

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Hazlitt, William

36.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

40.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

41.

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)

42.

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

43.

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

Winner, Michael

44.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

48.

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

Rabelais, Francois

49.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

50.

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