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

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

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

Aristotle

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

Kraus, Karl

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

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

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.

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

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

Porter, O. Henry

10.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

11.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

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.

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

14.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

15.

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

16.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

17.

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

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

20.

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

Adler, Freda

21.

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

22.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

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

Proverb, French

24.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

25.

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

Hazlitt, William

26.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

27.

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

28.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

29.

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

Huston, John

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

36.

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

37.

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

38.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

39.

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

Will, George F.

40.

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

41.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

42.

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)

43.

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.

44.

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

Genet, Jean

45.

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

Peterson, Jill

46.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

49.

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

50.

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