The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed.
—Honore de Balzac (1799–1850) French Novelist
I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.
—Charles Dickens (1812–70) English Novelist
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.
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) American Head of State
Poverty may be the mother of crime, but lack of good sense is the father
—Jean de La Bruyere (1645–96) French Satiric Moralist, Author
Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.
—Aristotle (384BCE–322BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Scholar
As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
Life is a sheet of paper white, Whereon each one of us may write His word or two, and then comes night. Greatly begin! Though thou have time But for a line, be that sublime—Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
—James Russell Lowell (1819–91) American Poet, Critic
Heaven will permit no man to secure happiness by crime.
—Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803) Italian Poet, Dramatist
We are the people our parents warned us about.
—Jimmy Buffett (b.1946) American Musician, Author
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.
—David Letterman (b.1947) American TV Personality, Comedian
One crime is everything; two nothing.
—Dorothee Luzy Dotinville (1747–1830) French Dancer, Actress
Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) British Novelist, Essayist, Biographer
Small crimes always precede great ones. Never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.
—Jean Racine (1639–1699) French Dramatist
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.
—Henry George (1839–97) American Political Economist, Journalist
Don’t steal. The government hates competition.
—Anonymous
Set a thief to catch a thief.
—Common Proverb
Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.
—Juvenal (c.60–c.136 CE) Roman Poet
Whenever man commits a crime heaven finds a witness.
—Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803–73) British Novelist, Poet, Politician
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.
—Albert Camus (1913–60) Algerian-born French Philosopher, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist, Author
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
Obviously crime pays, or there’d be no crime.
—G. Gordon Liddy (1930–2021) American Lawyer, Talk Show Host
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.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
Today more Americans are imprisoned for drug offenses than for property crimes
—George Will (b.1941) American Columnist, Journalist, Writer
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.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022) American Social Critic, Essayist
We cannot be sure that we ought not to regard the most criminal country as that which in some aspects possesses the highest civilization.
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British Sexologist, Physician, Social Reformer
There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Great thieves punish little ones.
—Common Proverb
When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
Of all the adult male criminals in London, not two in a hundred have entered upon a course of crime who have lived an honest life up to the age of twenty.—Almost all who enter on a course of crime do so between the ages of eight and sixteen.
—Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83) British Statesman