Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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.

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

Huston, John

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

Will, George F.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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

Peterson, Jill

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

10.

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

11.

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

Proverb, French

12.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

16.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

17.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

20.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

21.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

22.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

23.

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)

24.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

25.

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

26.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Aristotle

30.

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

Hazlitt, William

31.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

32.

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

Farber, Barry J.

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

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

Horace

35.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

36.

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

37.

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

Meredith, Owen

38.

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

Capone, Al

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

Genet, Jean

41.

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

42.

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

Scott, Howard

43.

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

44.

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

Adler, Freda

45.

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

46.

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

Plato

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

50.

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