This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"While small States are virtuous of their feebleness, powerful States sustain themselves only through crime." - Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
"It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"We cannot leave behind us the sins of our past. We must not forget that nothing disappears. Everything is eternal. Everything that has been is still in existence. The whole history of humanity is the “history of crime”... Man must go back, seek for, and destroy the causes of evil however far back they lie. It is only in this idea that the hint of the possibilities of a general evolution can be found. It is only in this idea that the possibility of changing the karma of humanity lies, because changing the karma means changing the past... There will be no possibility of thinking of evolution of humanity, if the possibility did not exist for individually evolving man to go into the past and struggle against the causes of the present evil which lie there." - P.D. Ouspensky, fully Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, also Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii, also Uspenskii or Uspensky
"Wherever a man commits a crime, God finds a witness... Every secret crime has its reporter." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The crime which bankrupts men and states is job-work - declining from your main design, to serve a turn here or there." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Great is the mischief of a legal crime." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a human intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies
"This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll
"It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime, it is the worst of all." - Arthur Conan Doyle, fully Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle
"By all human laws, as well as divine, self-murder has ever been agreed on a the greatest crime." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes fo mankind, is wisdom. Teach a man to read and write, and yo have put into his hands the great keys of the wisdom box. But it is quite another matter whether he ever opens the box or not." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"The ending of a relationship is as mysterious as its beginning... We tend to look for rational causes and to blame one of the parties for committing the crime of ending. Fate and its important relationship to the soul are forgotten... The soul in a relationship is not only contained in each individual, it is also contained in the relationship itself." - Thomas Moore
"Fear succeeds crime - it is its punishment." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Fear follows (succeeds) crime, and is its punishment." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man’s nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill." - William Hazlitt
"Slums may be breeding-grounds of crime, but middle-class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium." - Cyril Connolly, fully Cyril Vernon Connolly
"Intemperance is the epitome of every crime, the cause of every kind of misery. " - Douglas William Jerrold
"Evolving our consciousness is not something we do only for ourselves - it is something we also do for others...for all others, and for the earth. Because we open up and let our body and mind feel the ties with others and with nature, we change ourselves, and change others around us. When a sufficient number of people pray or meditate together, or find another path to evolve their consciousness, other people are affected as well. More sick people heal, divorce and suicide rates drop, crime and violence diminish. When many people open up, a powerful force develops - a leap of consciousness takes place." - Ervin László
"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." - William George Jordan
"Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit." - Freda Adler
"There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty." - George Farquhar
"Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells
"The hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself." - Hannah Arendt
"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. " - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken
"War is a crime which involves all other crimes." - Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"We should never victimize as we do, children whose only crime is color." - James Baldwin, fully James Arthur Baldwin
"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. " - John Philpot Curran
"The crime of mass forced schooling is this: it amputates the full argument and replaces it with engineered consensus." - John Taylor Gatto
"False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing." - Joseph de Maistre, fully Joseph-Marie, comte de Maistre
"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." - Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly
"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." - Karl Popper, fully Sir Karl Raimund Popper
"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." - Kurt Hahn, fully Kurt Martin "the rod" Hahn
"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." - Learned Hand, fully Billings Learned Hand
"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." - Lewis Edward Lawes
"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." - Lewis H. Lapham
"No crime [evil] is founded upon reason. " - Livy, formally Titus Livius, aka Titus Livy NULL
"War is a crime which involves all others crimes. " - Lord Brougham, fully Henry Peter Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux
"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." - Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
"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." - Mary Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
"The crime of loving is forgetting." - Maurice Chevalier, fully Maurice Auguste Chevalier
"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." - Max Lerner, fully Maxwell "Max" Alan Lerner, aka Mikhail Lerner
"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." - Michael Parenti
"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." - Michel Foucault
"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." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"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." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL
"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." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu