Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Adler, Freda

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Will, George F.

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

Scott, Howard

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

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

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

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

Genet, Jean

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

10.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

11.

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

Meredith, Owen

12.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

16.

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

Adler, Freda

17.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

18.

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)

19.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

20.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Porter, O. Henry

26.

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

Winner, Michael

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, French

29.

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

30.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

31.

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

Rabelais, Francois

32.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

33.

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

34.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

35.

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

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

Peterson, Jill

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

45.

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

Farber, Barry J.

46.

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

Huston, John

47.

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

48.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

49.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

50.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De