Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

- Racine, Jean

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Plato

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

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

Capone, Al

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

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

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

Porter, O. Henry

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

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

Winner, Michael

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

Shakespeare, William

10.

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

Scott, Howard

11.

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

12.

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

Farber, Barry J.

13.

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

Horace

14.

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

Rabelais, Francois

15.

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.

16.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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.

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

Kraus, Karl

19.

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.

20.

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

21.

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)

22.

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

23.

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

24.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

25.

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

26.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

27.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

28.

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

Huston, John

29.

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

Will, George F.

30.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

31.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

32.

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

33.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

34.

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

35.

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

Hazlitt, William

36.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb, French

41.

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

Connolly, Cyril

42.

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

Adler, Freda

43.

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

44.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

47.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

48.

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

49.

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

Genet, Jean

50.

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

Peterson, Jill