Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

Plato

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

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

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

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

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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.

10.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

11.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

12.

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

Farber, Barry J.

13.

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

Proverb, French

14.

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.

15.

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

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

17.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

18.

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

19.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

20.

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

21.

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

Hazlitt, William

22.

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

Winner, Michael

23.

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

Capone, Al

24.

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

25.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

26.

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

Horace

27.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

28.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

29.

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

Adler, Freda

30.

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

Peterson, Jill

31.

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

32.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

33.

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

34.

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)

35.

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

36.

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

Kraus, Karl

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.

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

39.

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

Will, George F.

40.

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

41.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

42.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

43.

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

Rabelais, Francois

44.

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

Connolly, Cyril

45.

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

Scott, Howard

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

48.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

49.

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

50.

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

Aristotle