Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Farber, Barry J.

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Proverb, French

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

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

Will, George F.

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

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

Adler, Freda

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

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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

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

Farber, Barry J.

10.

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

Rabelais, Francois

11.

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

Porter, O. Henry

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Capone, Al

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

21.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

22.

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

23.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Huston, John

29.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

30.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

31.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

32.

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

Plato

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

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

35.

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

36.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

37.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

38.

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)

39.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

40.

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

Horace

41.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

43.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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

46.

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

Winner, Michael

47.

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

Shakespeare, William

48.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

49.

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