Great Throughts Treasury

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

Related Quotes

Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis

Decency, security, and liberty alike demand that government officials shall be subjected to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen. In a government of laws, existence of the government will be imperiled if it fails to observe the law scrupulously. Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal -- would bring terrible retribution. Against that pernicious doctrine this court should resolutely set its face.

Administration | Conduct | Contempt | Crime | Doctrine | Existence | Good | Government | Law | Liberty | Man | Means | Order | People | Will | Government |

Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

I seek not a fellow feeling in my misery. No sympathy may I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to be participated. But now that virtue has become to me a shadow, and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair, in what should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my sufferings shall endure; when I die, I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honour and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

Associates | Beauty | Crime | Dreams | Enemy | Feelings | God | Loathing | Love | Man | Qualities | Sympathy | Virtue | Virtue | Beauty | God | Friends | Happiness |

Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner

The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Absolute | Crime | Effort |

Michael Parenti

Even though the crime rate has dropped in recent years, the United States has more police per capita then any other nation in the world.

Crime |

Michel Foucault

Together with war [the death penalty] was for a long time the other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person... As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise - and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings - made it more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others.

Awakening | Capital punishment | Crime | Danger | Death | Feelings | Kill | Life | Life | Logic | People | Power | Punishment | Reason | Right | Time | War | Danger |

Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman

The reign of tears is over. The slums will be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent." That is how Billy Sunday, noted evangelist and leading crusader aginst Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in 1920, enacted in a burst of moral righteousness at the end of the First World War. That episode is a stark reminder of where drives to protect us from ourselves can lead. Prohibition was imposed for our own good. Alcohol is a dangerous substance. More lives are lost each year from alcohol than from all the dangerous substances the FDA controls put together. But where did Prohibtion lead? New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Al Capone, Bugs Moran became notorious for their exploits - murder, extortion, hijacking, bootlegging.Who were their customers? Respectable citizens who would never themselves have approved or engaged in, the activites that Al Capone and his fellow gangsters made infamous. They simply wanted a drink. In order to have a drink, they had to break the law. Prohbition didnt stop drinkin. It did convert a lot of otherwise law-obedient citizens into lawbreakers. It did suppress many of the disciplinary forces of the market that ordinarily protect the consumer from shoddy, adulterated, and dangerous products. It did corrupt the minions of the law and create a decadent moral climate. It did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Children | Crime | Hell | Law | Men | Order | Righteousness | Tears | Will | World |

Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL

To kill one man is to be guilty of a capital crime, to kill ten men is to increase the guilt ten-fold, to kill a hundred men is to increase it a hundred-fold. This the rulers of the earth all recognize and yet when it comes to the greatest crime—waging war on another state—they praise it! It is clear they do not know it is wrong, for they record such deeds to be handed down to posterity; if they knew they were wrong, why should they wish to record them and have them handed down to posterity? If a man on seeing a little black were to say it is black, but on seeing a lot of black were to say it were white, it would be clear that such a man could not distinguish between black and white. Or if he were to taste a few bitter things were to pronounce them sweet, clearly he would be incapable of distinguishing between sweetness and bitterness. So those who recognize a small crime as such, but do not recognize the wickedness of the greatest crime of all—the waging of war on another state–but actually praise it—cannot distinguish between right and wrong. So as to right or wrong, the rulers of the world are in confusion.

Crime | Deeds | Distinguish | Earth | Guilt | Kill | Little | Man | Men | Praise | Right | Taste | War | Wickedness | World | Deeds | Guilty |

Elizabeth Fry, fully Elizabeth "Betsy" Fry, née Gurney

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal.

Crime | Reform |

Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu

Destruction is not the law of humans. Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him. Every murder or other injury, no matter for what cause, committed or inflicted on another is a crime against humanity.

Crime | Law | Man | Murder | Need | Murder |

Mustapha Mahmoud

Do you know? What does it mean that God exists? Means that justice and mercy is found and forgiveness exist. Meant to reassure the heart and soul and comfortable living heart and removes the right to be concerned and continued to his companions. Meaning... Tears will not go in vain and will not go without the fruit of patience and will not be good for nothing and will not pass the evil unchecked will not get away with crime without punishment. Means that the vineyard is to govern the existence and is not a stingy .. It is not printed decent take away what gives .. If God gave us life, he can not rob to death .. There can be negatively death to life .. But it is a move out to another life after death, then life again after the Baath and then to the mystic's in heaven forever.

Crime | Death | Evil | Existence | Forgiveness | God | Good | Heart | Heaven | Justice | Life | Life | Means | Mercy | Nothing | Patience | Right | Soul | Tears | Will | Forgiveness | God | Govern |

Nathaniel Hawthorne

By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.

Crime | Earth | Sin | Sympathy |

Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

The infectiousness of crime is like that of the plague.

Crime |

Newton Minow, fully Newton Norman Minow

Children will watch anything, and when a broadcaster uses crime and violence and other shoddy devices to monopolize a child's attention, it's worse than taking candy from a baby. It is taking precious time from the process of growing up.

Crime | Time | Will |

Osho, born Chandra Mohan Jain, also known as Acharya Rajneesh and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh NULL

This is the greatest crime that society commits against every child. No other crime can be greater than this. To spoil a child’s trust is to spoil his whole life because trust is so valuable that the moment you lose trust, you also lose your contact with your own being.

Crime | Life | Life | Society | Trust | Society |

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Twin-sister of Religion, Selfishness! Rival in crime and falsehood, aping all The wanton horrors of her bloody play; Yet frozen, unimpassioned, spiritless, Shunning the light, and owning not its name, Compelled by its deformity to screen With flimsy veil of justice and of right Its unattractive lineaments that scare All save the brood of ignorance; at once The cause and the effect of tyranny; Unblushing, hardened, sensual and vile; Dead to all love but of its abjectness; With heart impassive by more noble powers Than unshared pleasure, sordid gain, or fame; Despising its own miserable being, Which still it longs, yet fears, to disenthrall.

Cause | Crime | Heart | Justice | Love | Right |

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder.

Crime | Infamy | Kill | Right | Servitude |

Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin

Is it possible that you do not know what a hostage really is — a man imprisoned not because of a crime he has committed, but only because it suits his enemies to exert blackmail on his companions? ... If you admit such methods, one can foresee that one day you will use torture, as was done in the Middle Ages.

Crime | Day | Man | Will |

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently, the biggest crimes actually escape being called crimes. This limitation of the field of vision of criminology together with the absence of an exact and permanent definition of the concept of crime is one of the chief characteristics of our culture.

Absence | Crime | Vision |

P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

Crime |