Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal.
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.
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.
From a single crime know the nation.
Great thieves punish little ones.
He 63 ways of getting money, the most common, most honorable ones being staling, thieving, and robbing.
He has committed the crime who profits by it.
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.
He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen, him not know t, and he's not robbed at all.
He threatens many that hath injured one.
He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it.
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.
If poverty is the mother of crime, lack of good sense is the father.
In times of trouble leniency becomes crime.
It is because they took the easy way out that rivers, and people, go crooked.
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.
Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.
Locks keep out only the honest.
Many a man is saved from being a thief by finding everything locked up.
Many commit the same crime with a different destiny; one bears a cross as the price of his villainy, another wears a crown.
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