Quotes about Police

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.

They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children - though their children were, in fact happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched

Hell is a place where the motorists are French, the policemen are German, and the cooks are English.

Surely the fact that a uniformed police officer is wearing his hair below his collar will make him no less identifiable as a policeman.

There is, and always has been, one tremendous ruler of the human race - and that ruler is that combination of the opinions of all, the leveling up of universal sense which is called public sentiment. That is the ever-present regulator and police of humanity.

In the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrong doing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.

Entirely too much energy of our state police force is [spent] controlling honest citizens, simply because it is something they can succeed in doing.

Philosophical argument, trying to get someone to believe something whether he wants to believe it or not, is not, I have held, a nice way to behave towards someone; also it does not fit the original motivation for studying or entering philosophy. That motivation is puzzlement, curiousity, a desire to understand, not a desire to produce uniformity of belief. Most people do not want to become thought-police. The philosophical goal of explanation rather than proof not only is morally better, it is more in accord with one's philosophical motivation.

Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?

There is no reason for anyone in this country, anyone except a police officer or a military person, to buy, to own, to have, to use a handgun. . . . And the only way to do that is to change the Constitution.

I do not believe in people owning guns. Guns should be owned only by [the] police and military. I am going to do everything I can to disarm this state.

The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder.

Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can find it in shreds of cloth, in the interstices of floor boards, on the iron of a heel, and can measure it and swear to it and weave it into a rope to hang a man.

Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can . . . weave it into a rope to hang a man.

I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about being a man. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are ashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay unless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has been put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we will have none of it. Equality, likewise; is condescending at best and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the inner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not suffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than superiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my point, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your histories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police with power to enforce political correctness in all speech and apprehension.

Laws are only words, words written on paper, words that change on society's whim and are interpreted differently daily by politicians, lawyers, judges, and policemen. Anyone who believes that all laws should always be obeyed would have made a fine slave catcher. Anyone who believes that all laws are applied equally, despite race, religion, or economic status, is a fool.

We live in an age when pizza gets to your home before the police. (The question, of course, is whether this is good or bad.)

The police cannot protect the citizen at this stage of our development, and they cannot even protect themselves in many cases. It is up to the private citizen to protect himself and his family, and this is not only acceptable, but mandatory.

Because the Nazi venom worked its way even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest; because an all-powerful police sought to force us into silence every word became as precious as a declaration of principle; because we were persecuted, each of our gestures carried the weight of a commitment.

There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.

Some women blush when they are kissed, some call for the police, some swear, some bite. But the worst are those who laugh.

For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution invested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is a higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery.

An exhaustive study of police records shows that no woman has ever shot her husband while he was doing the dishes.

Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.

There was too much noise. Sirens from police cars and ambulances. Shouts from the crowd on the street eighteen floors below. Traffic from other streets and all of the noises of San Francisco. Mostly, though, there were the voices. Whispering to him. Reminding him of the dark things he had done - all of the little things he had forgotten, all of the big things he had tried to forget. Mostly they reminded him of his biggest secret, a betrayal of trust and friendship long ago. He squeezed his eyes shut as if that could somehow keep the voices away.

Rush If you ever see me getting beaten by the police, put down the video camera and come help me.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. . . . The only proper functions of a government are: the police, to protect you from criminals; the army, to protect you from foreign invaders; and the courts, to protect your property and contracts from breach or fraud by others, and to settle disputes by rational rules, according to objective law.

POLICE, n. An armed force for protection and participation.

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among men is primarily based on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions such as courts of justice and police.