This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There are two kinds of crimes: those committed by people who are caught and convicted, and those committed by people who are not. Which category a particular crime falls into is directly related to the wealth, power, and prestige of the criminal. The former category includes such crimes as purse snatching, mugging, armed robbery and breaking and entering. The latter category includes war atrocities, embezzlement, most political actions, and budget appropriations.
The violence done us by others is often less painful than that which we do to ourselves.
(Rape) is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused.
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.
Crime | Good | Little | Reality | Reputation | Wonder | Victim |
To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.
Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
Henry Kissinger, fully Henry Alfred Kissinger
In crisis the most daring course is often the safest. The riskiest course in my experience has been gradual escalation that the opponent matches step by step, inevitably reaching a higher level of violence and often an inextricable stalemate.
Daring | Experience | Crisis |
Human beings do not naturally support violence and terror. They do so only when they believe their lives or country are at stake.
Terror |
The unique ability of humans to imagine gives enormous power to idealism, an imagining of a better state of things not yet in existence. That power has been misused to send young men to war. But the power of idealism can also be used to attain justice, to end the massive violence of war.
Ability | Better | Existence | Idealism | Justice | Men | Power | Unique | War |
There is no likeness or proportion between life, however painful, and death; and therefore there is no equality between the crime of murder and the retaliation of it but what is judicially accomplished by the execution of the criminal. His death, however, must be kept free from all maltreatment that would make the humanity suffering in his person loathsome or abominable.
Crime | Death | Equality | Humanity | Life | Life | Murder | Retaliation | Suffering | Murder |
When crime wishes to attack innocence, it can always find a pretext for doing so.
The chief cause of our misery is less the violence of our passions than the feebleness of our virtues.
Cause |
Leonardo da Vinci, fully Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
Force is only a desire for flight: it lives by violence and dies from liberty.