Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

About Freda Adler

Freda Adleris a criminologist and educator, currently serving as professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was President of the American Society of Criminology in 1994-1995.

More about the author

More quotes from Freda Adler

Rape is the only crime in which the victim becomes the accused.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

That man is a creature who needs order yet yearns for change is the creative contradiction at the heart of the laws which structure his conformity and define his deviancy.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

There is another side to chivalry. If it dispenses leniency, it may with equal justification invoke control.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

The Rubicons which women must cross, the sex barriers which they must breach, are ultimately those that exist in their own minds.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator

The passionate controversies of one era are viewed as sterile preoccupations by another, for knowledge alters what we seek as well as what we find.

Freda Adler

Criminologist, educator