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

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

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

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 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

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

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

10.

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

Plato

11.

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

Capone, Al

12.

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

13.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

14.

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

Porter, O. Henry

15.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

16.

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

17.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

18.

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

19.

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

20.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

21.

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

Genet, Jean

22.

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

Hazlitt, William

23.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

24.

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

25.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

26.

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

Proverb, French

27.

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

28.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

Will, George F.

30.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

31.

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

32.

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

33.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

34.

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

35.

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

Scott, Howard

36.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

37.

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

Peterson, Jill

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

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

40.

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

Farber, Barry J.

41.

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

Mencken, H. L.

42.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

43.

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