Police quotes
869 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
"We don't need police officers who see themselves as warriors. We need police officers who see themselves as guardians and parts of the community. You can't police a community that you're not a part of."
"One can only guess the amount of magic mushrooms a sane person would have to consume to believe that a frisbee constituted a genuine threat to roughly 3,000 police officers."
"May God prevent us from becoming "right-thinking men"-that is to say men who agree perfectly with their own police."
"Instead of war on poverty, they got a war on drugs so the police can bother me."
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside police — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"No one knew what Rodney King had done beforehand to be stopped. No one realized that he was a parolee and that he was violating his parole. No one knew any of those things. All they saw was this grainy film and police officers hitting him over the head."
"And what have you laymen made of hell? A kind of penal servitude for eternity, on the lines of your convict prisons on earth, to which you condemn in advance all the wretched felons your police have hunted from the beginning - enemies of society, as you call them. You're kind enough to include the blasphemers and the profane. What proud or reasonable man could stomach such a notion of God's justice? And when you find that notion inconvenient it's easy enough for you to put it on one side. Hell is not to love any more, Madame. Not to love any more!"
"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."
"The business of popularizing crime is how we expose the faults in our justice system. It's how we expose police misconduct."
"Society questions the police and their methods, and the police say: 'Do you want the criminals off the street or not?'"
"We Americans have no commission from God to police the world."
"A black, a Puerto Rican and a Mexican are in a car. Who's driving? The police."
"You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads that the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for."
"Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on."
"Democracy and dependence on the military and police are incompatible."
"We're getting rid of bureaucracy, so that we're releasing time for police officers to be crime fighters and not form writers."
"Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly."
"The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun."
"There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal."
"But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognized by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realized, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection."
"The most personal thing I've put in [Touch of Evil] is my hatred of the abuse of police power. It's better to see a murderer go free than for a policeman to abuse his power."
"I know the police cause you trouble They cause trouble everywhere But when you die and go to Heaven You'll find no policemen there."
"Avoid being seized by the police. The cops are not your friends. Don't tell them anything."
"I agree that one can't dispense with the reins and the whip altogether, for knaves find their way even into literature, but no thinking will discover a better police for literature than the critics and the author's own conscience."
"The progress of any writer is marked by those moments when he manages to outwit his own inner police system."
