Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Successful crimes alone are justified.

- Dryden, John

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Meredith, Owen

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.

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

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

Genet, Jean

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Horace

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

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

10.

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

11.

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

Farber, Barry J.

12.

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

Proverb, French

13.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

14.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

15.

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

16.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

17.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

18.

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

19.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

20.

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)

21.

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

Shakespeare, William

22.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

23.

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

24.

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

Winner, Michael

25.

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

Kraus, Karl

26.

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.

27.

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

Scott, Howard

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

Rabelais, Francois

30.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

31.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

32.

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

Mencken, H. L.

33.

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

Will, George F.

34.

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

35.

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

Porter, O. Henry

36.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

40.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

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

42.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

43.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

47.

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

Adler, Freda

48.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

49.

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