Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

- Seneca

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Porter, O. Henry

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

Kraus, Karl

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

Genet, Jean

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Doctorow, E. L.

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

10.

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

11.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

12.

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

13.

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

Plato

14.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

15.

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

16.

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

Rabelais, Francois

17.

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

Shakespeare, William

18.

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)

19.

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

Peterson, Jill

20.

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

Adler, Freda

21.

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

Mencken, H. L.

22.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

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.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

25.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

26.

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

27.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

28.

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

Scott, Howard

29.

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

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

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

Capone, Al

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Connolly, Cyril

38.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

39.

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

40.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Winner, Michael

45.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

46.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Waugh, Evelyn