Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

He threatens many that hath injured one.

- Jonson, Ben

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Winner, Michael

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

Huston, John

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

Capone, Al

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

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

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

Genet, Jean

10.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

11.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

12.

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

13.

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

Aristotle

14.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

21.

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

Peterson, Jill

22.

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

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

25.

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

26.

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

27.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

28.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

30.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

31.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

37.

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

Rabelais, Francois

38.

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

Connolly, Cyril

39.

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

40.

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

Shakespeare, William

41.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

42.

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

43.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Horace

46.

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