"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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