Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

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

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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

Horace

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

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

Scott, Howard

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

10.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

11.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

12.

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

13.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

14.

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

Proverb, French

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

18.

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

Adler, Freda

19.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

20.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

21.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

22.

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)

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

29.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

30.

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

Aristotle

31.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Mencken, H. L.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

39.

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

40.

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

41.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

42.

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

43.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

45.

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.

46.

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