Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Locks keep out only the honest.

- Proverb, Jewish

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Scott, Howard

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

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

Peterson, Jill

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

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

Capone, Al

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

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

10.

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

Proverb, French

11.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

12.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

13.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

14.

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.

15.

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

Huston, John

16.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

17.

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

18.

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

Connolly, Cyril

19.

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

Horace

20.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

21.

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

22.

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

Hazlitt, William

23.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

28.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

29.

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

30.

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

Aristotle

31.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

32.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

33.

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

Will, George F.

34.

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

35.

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

Kraus, Karl

36.

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

37.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

38.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Mencken, H. L.

42.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George