Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Meredith, Owen

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

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

Bierce, Ambrose

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

10.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

15.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

16.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

17.

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

Horace

18.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

19.

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

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.

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

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

24.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

25.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

26.

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

Porter, O. Henry

27.

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

28.

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

29.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

30.

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.

31.

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

Rabelais, Francois

32.

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

33.

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

Huston, John

34.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

35.

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

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Peterson, Jill

39.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Scott, Howard

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

45.

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

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

48.

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

Farber, Barry J.

49.

Sade, Marquis De

50.

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