Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Great thieves punish little ones.

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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

Hazlitt, William

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Meredith, Owen

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

13.

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)

14.

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

15.

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

Genet, Jean

16.

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

Adler, Freda

17.

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

Rabelais, Francois

18.

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

Aristotle

19.

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

20.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

21.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

23.

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

Connolly, Cyril

24.

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

25.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

27.

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

28.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

29.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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.

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

32.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

33.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

34.

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

35.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

36.

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

37.

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

Kraus, Karl

38.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

39.

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

Will, George F.

40.

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

Capone, Al

41.

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

42.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

43.

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

Winner, Michael

44.

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

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

48.

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