Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Shakespeare, William

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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)

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

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

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

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

Aristotle

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

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

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

Porter, O. Henry

10.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

11.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

12.

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

Scott, Howard

13.

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

14.

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

Connolly, Cyril

15.

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

Hazlitt, William

16.

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

Proverb, French

17.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

18.

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

Meredith, Owen

19.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

24.

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

25.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

26.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

28.

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

29.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

30.

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

Huston, John

31.

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

32.

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

Adler, Freda

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Mencken, H. L.

44.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

45.

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

46.

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