Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Huston, John

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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

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

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Aristotle

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

13.

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

Hazlitt, William

14.

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

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

Connolly, Cyril

17.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

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.

Blake, William

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Farber, Barry J.

23.

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

Winner, Michael

24.

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

Rabelais, Francois

25.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

26.

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

27.

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

Will, George F.

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.

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

Proverb, French

30.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

31.

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

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

34.

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

Plato

35.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

36.

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

Meredith, Owen

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

45.

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

Capone, Al

46.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

47.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

48.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

49.

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

50.

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

Genet, Jean