Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

George, Henry

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

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.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

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

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

Aristotle

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

Rabelais, Francois

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

10.

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

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Winner, Michael

13.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

14.

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

15.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

16.

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

Plato

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Porter, O. Henry

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Will, George F.

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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

Horace

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.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

27.

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

28.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

30.

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

Genet, Jean

31.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

32.

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

33.

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

Mencken, H. L.

34.

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

Adler, Freda

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.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

37.

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

Huston, John

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

39.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

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.

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

Scott, Howard

42.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

43.

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

44.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Meredith, Owen

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.

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