Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Aristotle

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

Durkheim, Emile

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

10.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

11.

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

Plato

12.

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

13.

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

Mencken, H. L.

14.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

15.

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

16.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

19.

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

Adler, Freda

20.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

21.

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

22.

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

Peterson, Jill

23.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

24.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

25.

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)

26.

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

27.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

28.

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

29.

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

Winner, Michael

30.

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

Hazlitt, William

31.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

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.

33.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

34.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

35.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

37.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

38.

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

Proverb, French

39.

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

Shakespeare, William

40.

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

Porter, O. Henry

41.

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

Genet, Jean

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

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.

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