Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about 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

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

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

Doctorow, E. L.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

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 are often deterred from crime by the disgrace of others.

Horace

11.

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

Winner, Michael

12.

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

Shakespeare, William

13.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Hazlitt, William

17.

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

Meredith, Owen

18.

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

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

Proverb, French

21.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

24.

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

Plato

25.

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

26.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

27.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

28.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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.

30.

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

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Connolly, Cyril

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

39.

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

40.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

41.

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

Adler, Freda

42.

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

Aristotle

43.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

44.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

45.

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

Genet, Jean

46.

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

Porter, O. Henry

47.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

48.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

49.

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

50.

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