Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Hazlitt, William

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Plato

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

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Horace

12.

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

Mencken, H. L.

13.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

14.

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

Peterson, Jill

15.

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

Will, George F.

16.

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

Shakespeare, William

17.

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

18.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

19.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

20.

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

21.

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

Connolly, Cyril

22.

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

Winner, Michael

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Meredith, Owen

26.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

27.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

28.

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

Capone, Al

29.

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

30.

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

31.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

32.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

33.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

Rabelais, Francois

35.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

36.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

37.

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

Adler, Freda

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Farber, Barry J.

42.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Scott, Howard

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.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

50.

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