Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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.

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

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

Horace

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

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

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Capone, Al

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

Adler, Freda

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Proverb, French

14.

Set a thief to catch a thief.

Proverb, French

15.

One crime is everything, two is nothing.

Deluzy, Madame Dorothe

16.

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.

17.

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

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.

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

21.

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

22.

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

Peterson, Jill

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Rabelais, Francois

26.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

27.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

28.

Crime when it succeeds is called virtue.

Seneca

29.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

30.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

31.

Great thieves punish little ones.

Proverb

32.

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

Boorstin, Daniel J.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Plato

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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)

40.

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

41.

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

Porter, O. Henry

42.

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

43.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

45.

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

46.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

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

Will, George F.

48.

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

Genet, Jean

49.

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