Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Boorstin, Daniel J.

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

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

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

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

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

10.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

11.

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

12.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

13.

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

Farber, Barry J.

14.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

17.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

18.

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)

19.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

20.

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

Will, George F.

21.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

22.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

23.

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

Connolly, Cyril

24.

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

25.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Meredith, Owen

30.

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

31.

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

Aristotle

32.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

33.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

34.

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

Kraus, Karl

35.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Plato

39.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

40.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

41.

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

42.

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

Genet, Jean

43.

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

Capone, Al

44.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

48.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

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