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

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

Peterson, Jill

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

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

Plato

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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

Will, George F.

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

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

10.

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

Hazlitt, William

11.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

12.

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

13.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

14.

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

Farber, Barry J.

15.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

16.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Kraus, Karl

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Rabelais, Francois

23.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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

Huston, John

32.

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

Genet, Jean

33.

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

Horace

34.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

35.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

36.

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

37.

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

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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)

39.

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

Proverb, French

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

44.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

45.

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

46.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

47.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

48.

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

49.

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

50.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb