Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Connolly, Cyril

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

Arendt, Hannah

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

10.

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

11.

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

12.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

13.

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

Peterson, Jill

14.

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

15.

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

16.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

Porter, O. Henry

21.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

22.

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

Hazlitt, William

23.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

24.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

25.

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

Genet, Jean

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

28.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

29.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

30.

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

Adler, Freda

31.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

32.

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

Plato

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

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

Aristotle

36.

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

Farber, Barry J.

37.

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

Capone, Al

38.

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

Winner, Michael

39.

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)

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

44.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Horace

49.

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

Proverb, French

50.

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

Huston, John