Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Set a thief to catch a thief.

- Proverb, French

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

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

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

Proverb, French

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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

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

Connolly, Cyril

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

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

10.

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

11.

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

Farber, Barry J.

12.

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

Will, George F.

13.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

14.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

19.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

20.

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

21.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

23.

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

Aristotle

24.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

25.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

26.

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

27.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

28.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

29.

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)

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.

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

Huston, John

32.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

36.

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

Scott, Howard

37.

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.

38.

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

Capone, Al

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Genet, Jean

42.

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

Adler, Freda

43.

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

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Plato

49.

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

50.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish