Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

- Racine, Jean

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

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

Huston, John

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

10.

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

11.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

12.

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

Proverb, French

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

15.

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

Hazlitt, William

16.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

17.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

18.

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

Genet, Jean

19.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

20.

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

21.

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

Capone, Al

22.

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

23.

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

Scott, Howard

24.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

25.

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

26.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

29.

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

Horace

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

34.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

35.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

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

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

39.

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

Porter, O. Henry

40.

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)

41.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

42.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

43.

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

Peterson, Jill

44.

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

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.

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

Meredith, Owen

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

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

Shakespeare, William