Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

Successful crimes alone are justified.

- Dryden, John

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

Meredith, Owen

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

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

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

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

Small crimes always precedes great ones.

Racine, Jean

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

Horace

10.

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

Scott, Howard

11.

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

12.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

13.

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

Farber, Barry J.

14.

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

Hazlitt, William

15.

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

Peterson, Jill

16.

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

Rabelais, Francois

17.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

18.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

19.

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

20.

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

21.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

22.

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

23.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

24.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

27.

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

29.

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.

30.

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

Genet, Jean

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

35.

He has committed the crime who profits by it.

Seneca

36.

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

37.

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

Huston, John

38.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

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.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

La Bruyere, Jean De

43.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Will, George F.

47.

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

Porter, O. Henry

48.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

49.

One crime has to be concealed by another.