Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Capone, Al

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

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

Capone, Al

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

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Plato

10.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

11.

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

Rabelais, Francois

12.

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

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

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

Hazlitt, William

15.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

16.

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

17.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

21.

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

Scott, Howard

22.

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

Peterson, Jill

23.

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

24.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

25.

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

Genet, Jean

26.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

27.

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

28.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

29.

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

30.

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

Aristotle

31.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

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)

33.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

34.

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

35.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

36.

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

Horace

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.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Winner, Michael

42.

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

43.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

44.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

45.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

46.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

47.

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

48.

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

Adler, Freda

49.

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.

50.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver