Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Freda Adler

American Criminologist and Educator, Professor Emeritus in Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, President of the American Criminological Society

"(Rape) is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused."

"Of all the tyrannies which have usurped power over humanity, few have been able to enslave the mind and body as imperiously as drug addiction."

"It is little wonder that rape is one of the least-reported crimes. Perhaps it is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused and, in reality, it is she who must prove her good reputation, her mental soundness, and her impeccable propriety."

"The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find."

"Characteristically, major social movements are spawned in obscurity at the periphery of public awareness, seem to burst suddenly and dramatically into public view, and eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience"

"Characteristically, major social movements are spawned in obscurity at the periphery of public awareness, seem to burst suddenly and dramatically into public view, and eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience."

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

"The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes."

"Knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find."