Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

He threatens many that hath injured one.

- Jonson, Ben

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

Proverb, French

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

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

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

Scott, Howard

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

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.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

13.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

14.

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

Horace

15.

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

16.

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

Farber, Barry J.

17.

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

Peterson, Jill

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

20.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

21.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

22.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

23.

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

Plato

24.

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

Rabelais, Francois

25.

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

Adler, Freda

26.

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

Meredith, Owen

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

29.

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

Capone, Al

30.

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

31.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Connolly, Cyril

35.

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

36.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

38.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

39.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

40.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

41.

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

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

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

Hazlitt, William

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Mencken, H. L.

48.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

49.

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

50.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French