This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.
Phyllis Diller, born Phyllis Ada Driver
I'm the only woman who can walk in Central Park at night - and reduce the crime rate.
It is a crime against the State to be powerful enough to commit one.
Pitirim A. Sorokin, fully Pitirim Alexandrovich (Alexander) Sorokin
Freedom will become a myth. “Inalienable rights will be alienated; Declarations of Rights either abolished or used only as beautiful screens for an unadulterated coercion. Governments will become more and more hoary, fraudulent, and tyrannical, giving bombs instead of bread; death instead of freedom; violence instead of law.” Security will fade; the population will become weary and scared. “Suicide, mental disease, and crime will grow.”
We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender; we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.
Capital punishment | Crime | Extreme | Life | Life | Punishment |
Pope John Paul II, born Karol Józef Wojtyła, aka Saint John Paul the Great NULL
Violence is a lie, for it goes against the truth of our faith, the truth of our humanity, the life, the freedom of human beings. Violence is a crime against humanity, for it destroys the very fabric of society … On my knees I beg you to turn away from the paths of violence and to return to the ways of peace.
Barbara Ehrenreich, born Barbara Alexander
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological -- resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
Change | Character | Crime | Individual | Mystery |
The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them. The Brady Bill, which my husband signed into law in 1995, imposes a 5-day waiting period for gun purchases; time enough for authorities to check out a buyer's record and for the buyer to cool down about any conflict he might have intended the gun to resolve. Since it was enacted, more than 40,000 people with criminal records have been prevented from buying guns. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act banned 19 types of military-style assault weapons whose only purpose is to kill people… As part of a zero tolerance policy for weapons, drugs, and other threats to the safety of teachers and students, the President signed an executive order decreeing that any student who comes to school with a gun will be expelled and punished as a condition of federal aid.
Control | Crime | Enough | Husband | Kill | Law | Order | People | Policy | Purpose | Purpose | Time | Waiting | Weapons | Will |
The first step is to take weapons off the streets and to put more police on them. 25,000 new police officers are being trained, with the goal of adding 75,000 more by the end of the decade. Taking a cue from what's worked in the past, cities are deploying officers differently, getting them out from behind desks and putting them back on the sidewalks, where they can get to know the people who live and work on the streets they patrol. They will be doing what is called community policing. The other half of community policing, of course, is the community's role. Citizens have to be active participants in crime prevention. In Houston, nearly a thousand new officers added to the city's police force since 1991 have been joined by thousands of citizen patrollers observing and reporting suspicious or criminal behavior in an anticrime campaign.
Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.
Crime | Initiative |
The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.
Crime | Government | Land | Law | Nothing | Respect | Government | Respect |
We grow up corporate, not civic. For example, we were led to believe that most crime comes from the street.
Crime |
Raymond Chandler, fully Raymond Thornton Chandler
There are no 'classics' of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can never be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.
Robert Blatchford, fully Robert Peel Glanville Blatchford
You remember that from the first the Clarion crowd and the Hardie crowd were out of harmony...I loathe the “top-hatted, frock-coated magnolia-scented” snobocracy as much as you do; but I cannot away with the Keir Hardies and Arthur Hendersons and Ramsay MacDonalds and Bernard Shaws and Maxtons. Not long ago you told me in a letter of some trade union delegates who were smoking cigars and drinking whisky at the House of Commons at the expense of their unions. You liked them not. Nor do I like the Trade Union bigots who have cheated J. H. Thomas of his pension...I am glad the Labour Party is defeated because I believe they would have disrupted the British Empire. I dreaded their childish cosmopolitanism; their foolish faith that we could abolish crime by reducing the police force. ... The England of my affection and devotion is not a country nor a people: it is a tradition, the finest tradition the world has ever produced. The Labour Party do not subscribe to that tradition; do not know it; could not feel it.
If that gives you offense, I'm sorry. You are probably not stupid, insane or wicked; and ignorance is no crime in a country with strong local traditions of interference in the freedom of biology educators to teach the central theorem of their subject.
Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: But it's only fiction, only entertainment.
Crime |
Richard Nixon, fully Richard Milhous Nixon
Federal and state laws (should) be changed to no longer make it a crime to possess marijuana for private use.
Crime |