Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

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

Farber, Barry J.

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

Adler, Freda

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

10.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

11.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

12.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

13.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

14.

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

Meredith, Owen

15.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Horace

19.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

20.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

22.

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.

23.

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

Genet, Jean

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Rabelais, Francois

29.

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.

30.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

31.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

32.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

33.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

40.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

43.

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

44.

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)

45.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

46.

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

47.

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

Plato

48.

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

49.

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

Mencken, H. L.

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo