Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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

Huston, John

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

13.

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

14.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

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

Rabelais, Francois

18.

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

Will, George F.

19.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Farber, Barry J.

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

31.

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

32.

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

Adler, Freda

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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.

36.

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

Scott, Howard

37.

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

Plato

38.

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

Meredith, Owen

39.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

40.

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

Porter, O. Henry

41.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

42.

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)

43.

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

44.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

45.

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

Kraus, Karl

46.

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

47.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Genet, Jean