Motivational Quotes

Crime and criminals

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

Best Quotes about Crime and criminals

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

In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.

Proverb

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Farber, Barry J.

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Connolly, Cyril

From a single crime know the nation.

Virgil

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

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

10.

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

Rabelais, Francois

11.

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

Plato

12.

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

Porter, O. Henry

13.

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

14.

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

Howe, Edgar Watson

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Locks keep out only the honest.

Proverb, Jewish

20.

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

Proverb, French

21.

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

Genet, Jean

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

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

Kraus, Karl

25.

All criminals turn preachers under the gallows.

Proverb

26.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

Farquhar, George

27.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

28.

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

Meredith, Owen

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Will, George F.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Adler, Freda

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.

Crime generally punishes itself.

Goldsmith, Oliver

37.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

38.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

39.

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

40.

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

Winner, Michael

41.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Jonson, Ben

42.

Successful crimes alone are justified.

Dryden, John

43.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

45.

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

46.

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

Huston, John

47.

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

48.

The wrongdoer is more unfortunate than the man wronged.

Democritus

49.

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

Scott, Howard

50.

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