Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

10.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

11.

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

Proverb, French

12.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

13.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

14.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

15.

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

16.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

17.

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

Peterson, Jill

18.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

19.

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

Scott, Howard

20.

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

21.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

22.

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

23.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

24.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

25.

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

Horace

26.

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

Genet, Jean

27.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

28.

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

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

33.

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)

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

38.

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

Capone, Al

39.

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

40.

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

Kraus, Karl

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

44.

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

Porter, O. Henry

45.

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

Huston, John

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von