Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

From a single crime know the nation.

- Virgil

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Farber, Barry J.

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

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

10.

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

Scott, Howard

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Shakespeare, William

14.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

15.

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

Horace

16.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

17.

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

18.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

22.

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

Kraus, Karl

23.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

27.

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

28.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

29.

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

Winner, Michael

30.

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.

31.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

32.

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

Connolly, Cyril

33.

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

Plato

34.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

35.

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

Huston, John

36.

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

37.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

38.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

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.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

42.

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)

43.

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

Doctorow, E. L.

44.

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.

45.

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

Will, George F.

46.

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

Adler, Freda

47.

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

48.

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

Porter, O. Henry

49.

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

50.

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

Capone, Al