Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Aristotle

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

He reminds me of the man who murdered both his parents, and then when the sentence was about to be pronounced, pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was orphan.

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Scott, Howard

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Plato

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

Genet, Jean

10.

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

11.

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)

12.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

13.

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

14.

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

Proverb, French

15.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

16.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

17.

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

18.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

19.

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

20.

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

Will, George F.

21.

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

22.

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

Adler, Freda

23.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

24.

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

Horace

25.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

26.

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

27.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

31.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

34.

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

35.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

36.

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.

37.

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

Porter, O. Henry

38.

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

Rabelais, Francois

39.

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

40.

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

Huston, John

41.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

42.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

43.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

44.

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

45.

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

Peterson, Jill

46.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

47.

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

48.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

49.

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

Connolly, Cyril

50.

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