Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

- Waugh, Evelyn

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

Plato

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

Hazlitt, William

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Genet, Jean

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.

10.

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

Shakespeare, William

11.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

12.

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

Capone, Al

13.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

14.

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

15.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

16.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

17.

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

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.

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.

20.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

21.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Seneca

22.

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

Proverb, French

23.

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

Huston, John

24.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

25.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Peterson, Jill

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

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

32.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

33.

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

34.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

35.

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

Kraus, Karl

36.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

37.

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

38.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

39.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Horace

43.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

48.

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

49.

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

Porter, O. Henry

50.

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