Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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

Adler, Freda

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Capone, Al

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

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

Proverb, French

10.

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

Shakespeare, William

11.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

12.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

13.

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

Peterson, Jill

14.

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

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

16.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

17.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

18.

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

19.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

20.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

21.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

22.

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

23.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

24.

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

Rabelais, Francois

25.

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

26.

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

Scott, Howard

27.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

Plato

30.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

Genet, Jean

32.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

33.

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

Porter, O. Henry

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

41.

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

Farber, Barry J.

42.

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

43.

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

Winner, Michael

44.

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

45.

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

Will, George F.

46.

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

47.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

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