Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Connolly, Cyril

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Plato

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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.

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

11.

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

Proverb, French

12.

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

13.

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

Farber, Barry J.

14.

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

15.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

16.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

17.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

18.

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

19.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

20.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

21.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

22.

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

23.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

24.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

27.

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

Scott, Howard

28.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

29.

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

30.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

31.

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

Adler, Freda

32.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

37.

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.

38.

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

Genet, Jean

39.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

40.

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

41.

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

Capone, Al

42.

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

Connolly, Cyril

43.

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

Horace

44.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.