Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

- Proverb

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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

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

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)

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

Genet, Jean

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

Farber, Barry J.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

10.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

13.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

16.

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

Will, George F.

17.

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

18.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Porter, O. Henry

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Hazlitt, William

25.

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

26.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

27.

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

28.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

32.

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

Horace

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

35.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

36.

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

Kraus, Karl

37.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

38.

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

Huston, John

39.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

40.

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

41.

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

Winner, Michael

42.

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

43.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

44.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

45.

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

Connolly, Cyril

46.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.