Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

Bierce, Ambrose

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

Scott, Howard

10.

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

11.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

12.

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

13.

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

Proverb, French

14.

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

15.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

16.

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

17.

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

Capone, Al

18.

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.

19.

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

Winner, Michael

20.

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

21.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

22.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

31.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

32.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

33.

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

34.

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

Horace

35.

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

Connolly, Cyril

36.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

37.

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

Aristotle

38.

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

Huston, John

39.

Camus, Albert

40.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

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.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

43.

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

44.

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

Genet, Jean

45.

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

46.

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

Will, George F.

47.

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

48.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

49.

We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.