Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Shaw, George Bernard

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

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

Plato

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Waugh, Evelyn

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

Rabelais, Francois

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

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

14.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

15.

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

Aristotle

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Huston, John

21.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

22.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Scott, Howard

27.

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.

28.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

29.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

30.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

31.

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

32.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

33.

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

Peterson, Jill

34.

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

Horace

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.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

37.

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

Shakespeare, William

38.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

39.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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.

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

Will, George F.

42.

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.

43.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

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

Kraus, Karl

47.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

48.

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

Proverb, French

49.

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

Adler, Freda

50.

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