This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Gossip … has caused infinitely more sorrow in life than murder. It is drunkenness of the tongue; it is assassination of reputations. It runs the cowardly gamut from mere ignorant, impertinent intrusion into the lives of others to malicious slander ... He who listens to this crime of respectability without protest is as evil as he who speaks. One strong, manly voice of protest, of appeal to justice, of calling halt in the name of charity—could fumigate a room from gossip as a clear, sharp winter wind kills a pestilence.
Crime | Evil | Life | Life | Protest | Slander | Sorrow | Slander | Gossip |
Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.
There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.
The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself.
H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.
Crime |
H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift or law there is far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a national philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.
Absolute | Conformity | Crime | Custom | Force | Ideas | Law | Personality | Philosophy |
Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
War is a crime which involves all other crimes.
Crime |
James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
We should never victimize as we do, children whose only crime is color.
It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.
Crime | Eternal | Fate | God | Liberty | Man | Punishment | Rights | Servitude | Fate | God |
The crime of mass forced schooling is this: it amputates the full argument and replaces it with engineered consensus.
Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism.
Civilization | Corruption | Crime | Extreme | Good | Order | Virtue | Virtue |
Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But… the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder… This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes.
Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
I am referring to the published statistics on the rise of juvenile crime. For one age group the crime rate has in one year risen by 56 percent. For this state of affairs people blame the lack of parental control and leniency of the Law—the established educational system of the country is hardly ever held responsible. But some of us educators feel that we ought to say, nostra culpa, nostra maxima culpa, ours is the guilt, ours the greatest guilt.
Age | Blame | Control | Crime | Leniency | People | Statistics | System |
Learned Hand, fully Billings Learned Hand
If the prosecution of crime is to be conducted with so little regard for that protection which centuries of English law have given to the individual, we are indeed at the dawn of a new era; and much that we have deemed vital to our liberties, is a delusion.
As if one crime of such nature, done by a single man, acting individually, can be expiated by a similar crime done by all men, acting collectively.
Crime |
Talk about the flag or drugs or crime (never about race or class or justice) and follow the yellow brick road to the wonderful land of ''consensus.'' In place of honest argument among consenting adults the politicians substitute a lullaby for frightened children: the pretense that conflict doesn't really exist, that we have achieved the blessed state in which we no longer need politics.
Lord Brougham, fully Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
War is a crime which involves all others crimes.
Crime |