Police Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The free state offers what a police state denies - the privacy of the home, the dignity and peace of mind of the individual.

William O. Douglas

If you went to a home, kicked down the front door, chased the people who lived there out into the street and said, Go! You are free! Free as a bird! Go! Go! - do you think they would shout and dance for joy? They wouldn't. Birds are not free. The people you've just evicted would sputter, With what right do you throw us out? This is our home. We own it. We have lived here for years. We're calling the police, you scoundrel.

Last night I heard the screaming
Loud voices behind the wall
Another sleepless night for me
It won't do no good to call
The police
Always come late
If they come at all.

Stop-and-frisk is the most massive local racial profiling program in the country. All children, of every color, should feel protected by our police, not threatened, harassed or intimidated.

Benjamin Jealous

There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color.

We cannot find God for the same reason that a thief can't find a police officer.

Michael Horton (theologian)

No nation ought to keep a navy larger than is necessary to do police duty.

George W. Norris

Untrained minds have always been a nuisance to the military police of orthodoxy. God-intoxicated mystics and untidy saints with only a white blaze of divine love where their minds should have been, are perpetually creating almost as much disorder within the law as outside it.

Katherine Anne Porter

If you are like most people, you have an assortment of friends and family you can call upon in times of trouble. For instance, if you woke up in the middle of the night and saw a masked woman trying to crawl through your bedroom window, you might call your mother or father to help you push her back out. If you found yourself hopelessly lost in the middle of a strange city, you might ask the police to give you a ride home. And if you were an author locked in an Italian restaurant that was slowly filling up with water, you might call upon your acquaintances in the locksmith, pasta, and sponge businesses to come and rescue you.

The capture of this man was crucial to the rise of a free Iraq. It marks the end of the road for him, and for all who bullied and killed in his name. For the Baathist holdouts largely responsible for the current violence, there will be no return to the corrupt power and privilege they once held. For the vast majority of Iraqi citizens who wish to live as free men and women, this event brings further assurance that the torture chambers and the secret police are gone forever.

This evening, my thoughts return to the first night I addressed you from this house. September 11, 2001. That morning, terrorists took nearly 3,000 lives in the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbor. I remember standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center three days later, surrounded by rescuers who had been working around the clock. I remember talking to brave souls who charged through smoke-filled corridors at the Pentagon and to husbands and wives whose loved ones became heroes aboard Flight 93. I remember Arlene Howard, who gave me her fallen son's police shield as a reminder of all that was lost. And I still carry his badge.

The workers asked only for bread and a shortening of the long hours of toil. The agitators gave them visions. The police gave them clubs.

Mary Harris Jones

Though espionage is supposed to be thrilling, CIA memoirs are often boring. Usually written decades after the fact, always sanitized by government censors, the typical "autospyography" has the vague, approximate effect of a police sketch drawn from the memory of a traumatized witness.

Being quiet should be the default [when being questioned by the police].

If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim.

Secure web servers are the equivalent of heavy armored cars. The problem is, they are being used to transfer rolls of coins and checks written in crayon by people on park benches to merchants doing business in cardboard boxes from beneath highway bridges. Further, the roads are subject to random detours, anyone with a screwdriver can control the traffic lights, and there are no police.

You better get over here with my car, Grandad says. Before I call the cops and tell them you stole it. Sorry, I say contritely. Then the rest of what he said sinks in and I laugh. Wait, did you just threaten me with calling the police? Because that I'd like to see.

Actually, orcas aren't quite as complex as scientists imagine. Most killer whales are just four tons of doofus dressed up like a police car.

Christopher Moore

Sir Anthony Eden has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt in order to strengthen the United Nations. Every burglar of course could say the same thing, he could argue that he was entering the house in order to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be, he may be, then if he is sincere in what he is saying then he is too stupid to be a prime minister.

Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened in them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Michel Foucault

You probably know that this week Britain has been terrorized by an underclass of welfare-dependent, drug-addled criminal scum who have been allowed to run riot in the streets because the police haven't been allowed to do their job and protect the public. The media is full of speculation about why it happened and what is the root cause. Well, that's easy. The root cause is stupidity. A complete lack of imagination. A stunted, feral view of the world that amounts to self-inflicted moral and mental disablement. And it's the direct product of an entitlement culture that rewards idleness, encourages victimhood, and compensates criminals.

Not being invited in is one of the boxes on the suspicious behavior bingo form that every copper carries around in their head along with stupidly overpowerful dog and being too quick to supply an alibi. Fill all the boxes and you too could win an all-expenses-paid visit to your local police station.

Ben Aaronovitch

We didn't know that right before us Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar had just read from The Satanic Verses in a separate session. The minute I finished, people were queuing for me to sign copies of Narcopolis. But we were taken to this room where Hari and Amitava were sitting and we weren't allowed to leave. There was a lawyer, there were police on site and they threatened to close down the festival which made all of us feel like shit. I was full of remorse, because the directors are our friends and we knew how much work they had put into it, but I don't think we were really in trouble. Even though we were told to make ourselves scarce.

The corporation is not a person; it is a legal fiction backed up by guns and police and jail cells and taxing authorities and the regulators called government.