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

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Doctorow, E. L.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

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

Peterson, Jill

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Capone, Al

13.

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

14.

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

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.

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

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

19.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

20.

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

Meredith, Owen

21.

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

22.

George, Henry

23.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

24.

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

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Farber, Barry J.

30.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

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)

34.

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

Will, George F.

35.

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

Huston, John

36.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

37.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

38.

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

Genet, Jean

39.

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

40.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

41.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

43.

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

Scott, Howard

44.

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

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

47.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

48.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

49.

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

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo