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

Blake, William

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

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

Scott, Howard

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

Huston, John

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

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

10.

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

Winner, Michael

11.

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

Plato

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

14.

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

Kraus, Karl

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

18.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

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

Farber, Barry J.

24.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

25.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

26.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

27.

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

Meredith, Owen

28.

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

29.

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

Capone, Al

30.

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

31.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

32.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

33.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

34.

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.

35.

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

Will, George F.

36.

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

37.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

39.

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

Genet, Jean

40.

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

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.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

43.

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

Connolly, Cyril

44.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Horace

48.

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

Hazlitt, William

49.

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

Rabelais, Francois

50.

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