Theft Stealing Quotes & Sayings

I know that my grandmother certainly did nothing to warrant my mother stealing all of her jewelry that my grandfather had given her as gifts over the years, just so she could peddle it for heroin on the street. Those were precious metals and gems that could never be replaced, and each one had a story behind it. A love story between my grandparents, that my mother flushed down a proverbial toilet so that she could shoot up, throw up and pass out. — Ashly Lorenzana

Where there's property, there's theft. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Copying is not theft. Because when you steal something it means the other person doesn't have it anymore. — Lexi Alexander

Living creatures, if nothing else, have the right to life. It is their only truly precious possession, and the stealing of life is a wicked theft — Jack Vance

It seems to me that you and I were made for each other. I am your best friend's best friend and we both have a taste for stealing other people's jewellery. — P.G. Wodehouse

Manda and Sara are annoying because their whole belief system is in opposition to my own. They live by a Grand Theft Auto morality, by which lying, whoring, and stealing scores innumerable points. — Megan McCafferty

The firm of Strange had not been built on softness; what you stole from it, you were welcome to keep. — Keith Roberts

Wardrobing is buying an item of clothing, wearing it for a while, and then returning it in such a state that the store has to accept it but can no longer resell it. By engaging in wardrobing, consumers are not directly stealing money from the company; instead, it is a dance of buying and returning, with many unclear transactions involved. But there is at least one clear consequence - the clothing industry estimates that its annual losses from wardrobing are about $16 billion (about the same amount as the estimated annual loss from home burglaries and automobile theft combined). — Dan Ariely

Fear is a thief because fear robs you before you even begin. — Bryant McGill

It should be obvious why it's easier to copy someone else's painting, rather than work on site or even from a photograph. All the selection, rejection and design have already been done for you. — Ron Ranson

Severe and terrible punishments are enacted for theft, when it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it. — Thomas More

Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life. — Kevin Bales

But obviously if there was no concept of ownership there'd be no concept of stealing, would there? As long as there's one starving child in the world, all property is theft. — Fuminori Nakamura

It's not the goods that matter. It's the theft itself. That's what counts. — Walter Wykes

The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief; He robs himself that spends a bootless grief. — William Shakespeare

McReynolds emphatically shook his head. "No way. Legal's all over that deal. It's squeaky clean. Even the woman signed off. Trammel. I could make her a three-hundred-pound whore who likes black dick in the movie and she couldn't do a thing about it. That deal is perfect." "Yeah, well, what Legal's missed is the part about neither one of them having the rights to the story to sell you in the first place. Those rights happen to reside here with me. Trammel signed them over to me before Dahl came along and took second position. He thought he could move up one by stealing the original contracts out of my files. Only that's not going to work. I've got a witness to the theft and Dahl's fingerprints. He's going to go down on fraud and theft charges and your choice here is to decide whether you want to go down — Michael Connelly

There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. When you kill a man, you steal a life ... you steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a ather. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness ... there is no act more wretched than stealing. — Khaled Hosseini

Photography is always a kind of stealing. A theft from the subject. Artists are assaulters in a lot of ways, and the viewer is complicit in that assault. — Hanya Yanagihara

Like other forms of stealing, identity theft leaves the victim poor and feeling terribly violated. — George W. Bush

Steal from everyone and copy no one. — Charles Movalli

Stealing is stealing. I don't care if it's on the Internet or you're breaking into a warehouse somewhere - it's theft. — Patrick Leahy

Now let us consider theft. From the standpoint of the wealthy, this is, of course, an horrendous crime. But, laying partiality aside, let us ask ourselves as republicans: shall we, upholding the principle that all men are equal, brand as wrong an act whose effect is to accomplish a more equal distribution of wealth? Theft furthers economic equilibrium: one never hears of the rich stealing from the poor, thereby aggravating the economic imbalance; only of the poor stealing from the rich, thereby correcting it. What possibly be wrong with that? — Marquis De Sade

99% of all addicts are liars and thieves. This might sound unfair and even close-minded, but it's the truth. There are some exceptions to the rules, but they are incredibly rare. Most people are no match for their addictions. They will be driven to do things they would normally never have considered all in the name of getting high. Sad, but true. So if you're thinking of trying drugs, keep in mind that all the people you will be dealing with are likely to steal from you and lie to you at your own expense. — Ashly Lorenzana

There will always be music on the Internet that people can steal. What's new is not theft. What's new is a distribution channel for stolen property called the Internet. So there will always be illegal music on the Internet. — Steve Jobs

In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punishable brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted. The idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude.

A Congolese leader told of the Portuguese legal codes asked a Portuguese once, teasingly, 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground? — Howard Zinn

Men kill for many reasons, they steal but for one-greed. — Sharon Kay Penman

John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it. — Lierre Keith

But there are some things, child, that you should steal. That you must steal, if you have enough love and courage in your heart. You must snatch freedom from the hands of the tyrant. You must spirit away innocent lives before they are destroyed. You must hide secret and sacred places. — Lian Tanner

It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist. — Murray N. Rothbard

Theft is the one unforgivable sin, the one common denominator of all sins. When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness. There is no act more wretched then stealing. — Khaled Hosseini

It was a little like stealing. It was exactly like stealing. It was, in fact, stealing. But there was no law against it because no one knew the crime existed, so is it really stealing if what's stolen isn't missed? And is it stealing if you're stealing from thieves? Anyway, all property is theft, except mine. — Terry Pratchett

It's always easier to take something than work for it ... — Alexandra Bracken

The moment her hymen was plucked from her body in the wilderness,
Her soul was taken from sanity. — Roman Payne

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. — Marquis De Sade

If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught? — Robert J. Sawyer

The stealing began again with carrots, which apparently are the gateway vegetable, because soon it led to all manner of produce theft. — Jewel

The thief, as will become apparent, was a special type of thief. This thief was an artist of theft. Other thieves merely stole everything that was not nailed down, but this thief stole the nails as well. — Terry Pratchett

If you steal from one person is Theft, and if you steal from Lots of people is Research — Guthrie Govan

The man who was once starved may revenge himself upon the world not by stealing just once, or by stealing only what he needs, but by taking from the world an endless toll in payment of something irreplaceable, which is the lost faith. — Anais Nin

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author's condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped. — Jane Yolen