Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Huston, John

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

10.

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

Rabelais, Francois

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

14.

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

15.

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

Horace

16.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

17.

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

18.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

19.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

23.

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)

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.

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

26.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

27.

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

Kraus, Karl

28.

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

Winner, Michael

29.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

33.

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

Peterson, Jill

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Farber, Barry J.

37.

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

38.

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

Adler, Freda

39.

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

40.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

41.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

42.

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

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

44.

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

Scott, Howard

45.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

46.

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

Hazlitt, William

47.

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

48.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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