Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Huston, John

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

Proverb, French

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

Plato

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Hazlitt, William

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

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

Scott, Howard

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

10.

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

11.

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

Peterson, Jill

12.

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

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.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

19.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

22.

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

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

Capone, Al

25.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

26.

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

27.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, let him not know't, and he's notrobbed at all

Shakespeare, William

29.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

30.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

31.

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

Will, George F.

32.

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

33.

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

Mencken, H. L.

34.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

40.

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

41.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

42.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

46.

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

47.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

48.

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

49.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

50.

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