Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Porter, O. Henry

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

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

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

Farber, Barry J.

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

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

Rabelais, Francois

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

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

10.

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

Peterson, Jill

11.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

12.

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

13.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

14.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

15.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

16.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

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.

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.

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

Plato

22.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

23.

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

Proverb, French

24.

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

25.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

26.

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

Hazlitt, William

27.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

28.

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

Adler, Freda

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Huston, John

33.

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

Genet, Jean

34.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

35.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

36.

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

Horace

37.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

38.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

40.

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

41.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

42.

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

Connolly, Cyril

43.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Meredith, Owen

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von