Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

Porter, O. Henry

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Will, George F.

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

Scott, Howard

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

10.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

11.

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

Adler, Freda

12.

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

Huston, John

13.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

14.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

15.

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

Hazlitt, William

16.

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

Kraus, Karl

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

20.

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

21.

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

Rabelais, Francois

22.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

Plato

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Connolly, Cyril

29.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

30.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

33.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

34.

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

35.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

36.

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

Farber, Barry J.

37.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

38.

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

39.

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

Meredith, Owen

40.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

41.

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

42.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Genet, Jean

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, French