Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

Aristotle

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

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

10.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

11.

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

Genet, Jean

12.

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

13.

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

Porter, O. Henry

14.

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

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

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

17.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

18.

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

Hazlitt, William

19.

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

Scott, Howard

20.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

21.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

22.

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

23.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

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

25.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

26.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

27.

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

Huston, John

28.

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

29.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

30.

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

Farber, Barry J.

31.

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

Mencken, H. L.

32.

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

Meredith, Owen

33.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

34.

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

Shakespeare, William

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.

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)

37.

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.

38.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

39.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

40.

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.

41.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

45.

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

46.

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

Will, George F.

47.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

48.

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

49.

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

50.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca