This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Teachers should be held in the highest honor. They are the allies of legislators; they have agency in the prevention of crime; they aid in regulating the atmosphere, whose incessant action and pressure cause the life-blood to circulate, and to return pure and healthful to the heart of the nation." - Lydia Sigourney, fully Lydia Huntley Sigourney, née Lydia Howard Huntley
"Too much sensibility creates unhappiness; too much insensibility leads to crime." - Talleyrand, fully Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, 1st Prince de Bénévent NULL
"What greater crime than loss of time?" - Thomas Tusser
"Before crime is committed, conscience must be corrupted." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"The world is drenched in mutual slaughter… Held to be a crime when committed by individuals, homicide is called a virtue when committed by the state." - Cyprian, aka Saint Cyprian of Carthage, fully Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus NULL
"The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim. Conceit and false pride on the part of a nation prevent the rise of remorse for its crime." - Albert Einstein
"It is not a crime to be rich, nor a virtue to be poor… The sin lies in hoarding wealth and keeping it from circulating freely to all who need it." - Charles Fillmore
"Poverty is not the root cause of crime." - Rush Limbaugh
"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." -
"There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of 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." -
"The idea is to have contempt for crime, not for people… It’s more useful to think of every other person as another you - to think of every individual as a representative of the universe." - Rolling Thunder, born Louis Belmont Newell NULL
"No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make “safe” and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages. To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"We are made not only individually, but nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; but what of war and the much-vaunted crime of slaughtering whole peoples?… Deeds that would be punished by loss of life when committed in secret are praised by us because uniformed generals have carried them out." - Seneca the Younger, aka Seneca or Lucius Annaeus Seneca NULL
"No man was ever more than about nine meals away from crime or suicide." - Eric Sevareid, fully Arnold Eric Sevareid
"Behind every great fortune there is a crime." - Honoré de Balzac
"Concealment of the historical truth is a crime against the people." - Petro G. Grigorenko, or Petro Hryhorovych Hryhorenko or Pyotr Grigoryevich Grigorenko
"Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin; the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity." - Lazarus Long, fictional character created by Robert A. Heinlein
"Destiny: A tyrant's authority for crime and a fool's excuse for failure." - Ambrose Gwinett Bierce
"We can not learn without pain....The intention makes the crime...I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is the victory over self." - Aristotle NULL
"Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime." - Aristotle NULL
"To leave the number of births unrestricted, as is done in most states, inevitably causes poverty among the citizens, and poverty produces faction and crime." - Aristotle NULL
"The more doctors, the more disease; the more lawyers, the more crime; the more philosophers, the more folly; the more priests, the more sin." - Author Unknown NULL
"Poverty is the mother of crime." - Cassiodorus, fully Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator NULL
"Where true religion has prevented one crime, false religions have afforded a pretext for a thousand." - Charles Caleb Colton
"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." - Dick Gregory
"(Rape) is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused." - Freda Adler
"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." - Freda Adler
"What is the true content of art, and with what aim is this content to be presented? On this subject our consciousness supplies us with the common opinion that it is the task and ima of art to bring in contact with our sense, our feeling, our inspiration, all that finds a place in the mind of man... Its aim is therefore placed in arousing and animating the slumbering emotions, inclinations, and passions; in filling the heart, in forcing the human being, whether cultured or uncultured, to feel the whole range of what man’s soul in its inmost and secret corners has power to experience and to create, and all that is able to move and to stir the human breast in its depths and in its manifold aspects and possibilities; to present as a delight to emotion and to perception all that the mind possesses of real and lofty in its thought and in the Idea - all the splendor of the noble, the eternal, and the true; and no less to make intelligible misfortune and misery, wickedness and crime; to make men realize the inmost nature of all that is shocking and horrible, as also of all pleasure and delight; and, finally, to set imagination roving in idle toyings of fancy, and luxuriating in the seductive spells of sense-stimulating visions." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity. The distinction between crime and justice is no greater." - George Bernard Shaw
"Youth is a wonderful thing: what a crime to waste it on children." - George Bernard Shaw
"Alcohol produces artificial happiness, artificial courage, artificial gaiety, artificial self-satisfaction, thus making life bearable for millions who would otherwise be unable to endure their condition. To them alcohol is a blessing. Unfortunately, as it acts by destroying conscience, self-control, and the normal functioning of the body, it produces crime, disease and degradation." - George Bernard Shaw
"To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman." - George Santayana
"The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller
"To be left alone, and face to face with my own crime, had been just retribution." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"No radical change on the plane of history is possible without crime." - Hermann Keyserling, fully Hermann Alexander Graf Keyserling
"Every man is to be respected as an absolute end in himself: and it is a crime against the dignity that belongs to him as a human being, to use him as a mere means for some external purpose." - Immanuel Kant
"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." - Immanuel Kant
"In the name of religion many great and fine deeds have been performed. In the name of religion also, thousands and millions have been killed, and every possible crime has been committed." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"When crime wishes to attack innocence, it can always find a pretext for doing so." - Jean de La Fontaine
"Education is leading human souls to what is best, and no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave." - Joseph Addison
"Remorse is the punishment of crime; repentance, its expiation. The former appertains to a tormented conscience; the later to a soul changed for the better." - Joseph Joubert
"There are two types of justice: retributive justice and distributive justice. Retributive justice requires punishment for wrongdoing in proportion to the magnitude of the crime... Distributive justice refers to the fair distribution of benefits and burdens in a society." - Judith A. Boss
"The instigator of a crime is worse than the perpetrator." - Latin Proverbs
"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." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis