Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Crime generally punishes itself.

- Goldsmith, Oliver

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Plato

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

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

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

10.

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

Peterson, Jill

11.

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

12.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

13.

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

14.

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

Scott, Howard

15.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

16.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

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

19.

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

Huston, John

20.

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

Winner, Michael

21.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

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

23.

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

Capone, Al

24.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Kraus, Karl

27.

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

28.

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

Adler, Freda

29.

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

30.

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

Genet, Jean

31.

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

32.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

33.

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

Farber, Barry J.

34.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

35.

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

Rabelais, Francois

36.

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

37.

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

Proverb, French

38.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

40.

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)

41.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

46.

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

47.

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

Will, George F.

48.

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

Meredith, Owen

49.

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

50.

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

Shakespeare, William