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

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

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

Meredith, Owen

11.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

12.

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)

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

17.

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

Scott, Howard

18.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

19.

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

20.

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

Proverb, French

21.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

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

23.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

24.

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

25.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

26.

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

27.

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

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

30.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

31.

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

Genet, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

Hazlitt, William

34.

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

35.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

36.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

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

Shakespeare, William

38.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

39.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

40.

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

41.

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

42.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

43.

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

44.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

45.

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

Peterson, Jill

46.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

47.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

48.

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

49.

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

Farber, Barry J.

50.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George