"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 is 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. She has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975, holding various roles within United Nations organizations. A prolific
"Characteristically, major social movements are spawned in obscurity at the periphery of public awareness, seem to burst suddenly and dramatically into public view, and eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience."
"Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit."
"The Rubicons which women must cross, the sex barriers which they must breach, are ultimately those that exist in their own minds."
"Woman throughout the ages has been mistress to the law, as man has been its master."
"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."
"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."