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

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

Peterson, Jill

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.

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

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

Will, George F.

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

Farber, Barry J.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

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

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

Rabelais, Francois

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

16.

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

17.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

27.

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

Adler, Freda

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

33.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

34.

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

Capone, Al

35.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

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 wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

38.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

39.

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

Hazlitt, William

40.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

41.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

42.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

43.

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

44.

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

Porter, O. Henry

45.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

46.

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

Aristotle

47.

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

Scott, Howard

48.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

49.

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

50.

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

Proverb, French