Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Horace

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

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Doctorow, E. L.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

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

Rabelais, Francois

10.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

11.

After all, crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor.

Huston, John

12.

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

Hazlitt, William

13.

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

Peterson, Jill

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Will, George F.

18.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

19.

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

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

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.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

27.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

28.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

29.

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

Plato

30.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

31.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

33.

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

Meredith, Owen

34.

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

Scott, Howard

35.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

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

37.

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

38.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

39.

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)

40.

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

41.

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

Farber, Barry J.

42.

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

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

He threatens many that hath injured one.