Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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

Peterson, Jill

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

Proverb, French

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

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

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

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

11.

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

Porter, O. Henry

12.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

13.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

14.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

18.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

19.

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

Scott, Howard

20.

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

Adler, Freda

21.

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)

22.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

23.

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

24.

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

Winner, Michael

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

28.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

29.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Rabelais, Francois

33.

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

Horace

34.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

35.

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

Will, George F.

36.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

37.

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

Huston, John

38.

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

Capone, Al

39.

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

Meredith, Owen

40.

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

Aristotle

41.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

42.

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

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

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.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

50.

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