Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Scott, Howard

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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

Doctorow, E. L.

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

Kraus, Karl

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

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

10.

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

Horace

11.

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)

12.

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

Adler, Freda

13.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

14.

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

Rabelais, Francois

15.

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

Genet, Jean

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

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

Capone, Al

20.

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

Porter, O. Henry

21.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

22.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

23.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

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.

25.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

26.

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

27.

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

Farber, Barry J.

28.

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

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

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.

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

Winner, Michael

35.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

36.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

37.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

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.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Meredith, Owen

42.

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

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

Huston, John

44.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

45.

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

Peterson, Jill

46.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

47.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

48.

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

49.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

50.

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