Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Winner, Michael

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

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

Peterson, Jill

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

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

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

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

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)

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

Huston, John

10.

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

Genet, Jean

11.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

13.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

14.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

15.

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

16.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

17.

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

18.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

19.

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

20.

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

Will, George F.

21.

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

22.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

25.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

33.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

34.

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.

35.

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

Meredith, Owen

36.

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

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.

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.

39.

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

Capone, Al

40.

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

Proverb, French

41.

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

42.

One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.

Falcone, Giovanni

43.

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

Plato

44.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

45.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

46.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

47.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

48.

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

49.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

50.

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

Bierce, Ambrose