Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

Will, George F.

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

Scott, Howard

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

Proverb, French

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

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

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

Porter, O. Henry

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

10.

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

11.

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

Peterson, Jill

12.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

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

15.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

16.

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

Rabelais, Francois

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

20.

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

Horace

21.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

22.

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

23.

If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.

La Bruyere, Jean De

24.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

25.

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

Hazlitt, William

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Farber, Barry J.

34.

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

35.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

36.

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

37.

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

Connolly, Cyril

38.

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)

39.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

40.

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

Mencken, H. L.

41.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

42.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

43.

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

Kraus, Karl

44.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

45.

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

46.

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

Aristotle

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Meredith, Owen

50.

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

Adler, Freda