Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

Capone, Al

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

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

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

10.

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

Rabelais, Francois

11.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

14.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

15.

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

16.

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

Plato

17.

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

Meredith, Owen

18.

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

19.

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

Genet, Jean

20.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

21.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

22.

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

Aristotle

23.

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

24.

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

Kraus, Karl

25.

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

26.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

27.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

28.

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

Mencken, H. L.

29.

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

30.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

31.

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

Peterson, Jill

32.

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

Will, George F.

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

35.

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

Hazlitt, William

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

38.

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

Shakespeare, William

39.

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.

40.

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

Adler, Freda

41.

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

Connolly, Cyril

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

46.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

47.

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

48.

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

49.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

50.

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

Huston, John