The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs.more Friedrich August von Hayek quotes |
The authority of local government was similarly attacked. The not inconsiderable power of the Länder disappeared as a result of the decree of 28 February [1933] and the manipulated elections which followed. Control of the police passed into the hands of the NSDAP. ... Local elections were abolished and Reich Administrators ... were appointed to rule in place of the locally elected heads of government. On 30 January 1934 all local assemblies were abolished, and states were made totally subservient to central rule.more Paul Hayes quotes |
The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom.more Robert A. Heinlein quotes |
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If we cannot learn, if the only effect upon us of the presence of the dynamiter in our midst is to make us multiply punishments, invent restrictions, increase the number of our official spies, forbid public meetings, interfere with the press, put up gratings -- as in one country they propose to do -- in our House of Commons, scrutinize visitors under official microscopes, request them, as at Vienna, and I think now at Paris also, to be good enough to leave their greatcoats in the vestibules ... I venture to prophesy that there lies before us a bitter and an evil time.more Auberon Herbert quotes |
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy.more Frank Herbert quotes |
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The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so. Indeed I would go so far as to say that the underdog is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let's not have any native militia or police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order.more Adolf Hitler quotes |
You can be up to your boobies in white satin,
with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles,
but you can still be working on a plantation.more Billie Holiday quotes |
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[T]ake the war on drugs. The average American says, “The war on drugs has been beneficial.” The rest of us see reality. This war has destroyed thousands of Americans. It is also a pretext for government agents to rob innocent people in airports and on the highways -- they seize and confiscate large amounts of cash and say to their victims: “Sue us if you don’t like it.” And more and more judges, politicians, intelligence agents, and law-enforcement officers are on the take -- as dependent on the drug-war largess as the drug lords themselves.more Jacob G. Hornberger quotes |
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I cannot say that our country could have no secret police without becoming totalitarian, but I can say with great conviction that it cannot become totalitarian without a centralized national police.more Justice Robert H. Jackson quotes |
Whenever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator state, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units.more Carl Gustav Jung quotes |
It is, therefore, a fact of law and of practical necessity that individuals are responsible for their own personal safety, and that of their loved ones. Police protection must be recognized for what it is: only an auxiliary general deterrent.more Peter Alan Kasler quotes |
Ironically, the only gun control in 19th century England was the policy forbidding police to have arms while on duty.more Don B. Kates, Jr. quotes |
If somebody smokes a joint, we're gonna go in and bust them? We're gonna raid houses in case somebody has a banned substance? Confiscate their houses? My God, if people don't see that as an abuse of force, of too much government, then we're just not communicating.more Charles Koch quotes |
Some police chiefs for years have warned that we are “militarizing” our nation’s police. “Smart bombs” are used to enter drug dens. Officers are clad in paramilitary garb including battle helmets. Armored “urban” assault vehicles are tactically utilized on city streets. Cops are trained in military tactics. You cannot train officers in such a manner and then expect them to behave like “Officer Friendly” .... The FBI is an investigatory agency. Originally, they weren’t even armed. Why are lawyers and accountants being transformed into G.I. Joes? When such occurs we come dangerously close to establishing a National Police Force, something not intended by the framers of the U.S. Constitution.more Police Chief James J. Kouri quotes |
Let no man think we can deny civil liberty to others and retain it for ourselves. When zealous agents of the Government arrest suspected “radicals” without warrant, hold them without prompt trial, deny them access to counsel and admission of bail....we have shorn the Bill of Rights of its sanctity...more Robert M. Lafollette, Sr. quotes |
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The First Amendment issue here is, as the parties frame it, fairly narrow: is there a constitutionally protected right to videotape police carrying out their duties in public? Basic First Amendment principles, along with case law from this and other circuits, answer that question unambiguously in the affirmative.more Judge Kermit Victor Lipez quotes |
[T]he police do not and cannot protect law-abiding citizens from criminal violence. ... This thought may not occur to wealthy people who can shelter themselves in low-crime enclaves and who care not at all about their less fortunate neighbors. But no one knows it better than the police, who scrupulously preserve their own right to carry firearms on and off duty (and often after they retire as well) even while some of them advocate disarming those whom the police cannot protect.more Nelson Lund quotes |
If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. ... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America.more James Madison quotes |
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It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air -- that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
May God prevent us from becoming 'right-thinking men' -- that is to say, men who agree perfectly with their own police.more Thomas Merton quotes |
And it is not difficult to show, by abundant instances, that to extend the bounds of what may be called moral police, until it encroaches on the most unquestionably legitimate liberty of the individual, is one of the most universal of all human propensities.more John Stuart Mill quotes |
What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves.more Joel Miller quotes |
Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs,
our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy --
comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings
are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.more Joel Miller quotes |
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to bid restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.more John Milton quotes |
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There will be no prison which can hold our movement down...
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards
can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people.more Huey P. Newton quotes |
The imperialistic or capitalistic system occupies areas.
It occupies Vietnam now. They occupy them by sending soldiers there, by sending policeman there.
The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand.
They make the racist secure in his racism.
The gun in the establishment's hand makes the establishment secure in its exploitation.more Huey P. Newton quotes |
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We felt that the police needed a label, a label other than that fear image that they carried in the community. So we used the pig as the rather low-lifed animal in order to identify the police. And it worked.more Huey P. Newton quotes |
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.more Reverend Martin Niemoeller quotes |
In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.more Reverend Martin Niemoeller quotes |
The governments of the great States have two instruments for keeping the people dependent, in fear and obedience: a coarser, the army; and a more refined, the school.more Friedrich Nietzsche quotes |
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Should we believe self-serving, ever-growing drug enforcement/drug treatment bureaucrats, whose pay and advancement depends on finding more and more people to arrest and "treat"? More Americans die in just one day in prisons, penitentiaries, jails and stockades than have ever died from marijuana throughout history. Who are they protecting? From what?more Dr. Fred Oerther quotes |
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.more Thomas Paine quotes |
Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.more Thomas Paine quotes |
According to Gestapo records…they had little need to engage in direct spying on the citizens since the citizens themselves were more than willing to do their spying for them.more Kort E. Patterson quotes |
Under the constitution, there was never meant to be a federal police force. Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century. Yet today, fueled by the federal government’s misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the States where they have no legal authority. The sacrifice of individual responsibility and the concept of local government by the majority of American citizens has permitted the army of bureaucrats to thrive.more Dr. Ron Paul quotes |
What we need to do in this country is make sure the majority of the American people really want their freedoms back again, We have to have people once again believe in liberty, foreign policy that defends America, but is not the policeman of the world. We don’t have the right nor the facilities to throw our weight around and tell the rest of the world how to live.more Dr. Ron Paul quotes |
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If you permit the audio recordings, they'll be a lot more eavesdropping. ... There's going to be a lot of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers. ... Yes, it's a bad thing. There is such a thing as privacy.more Judge Richard Allen Posner quotes |
One of the fondest expressions around is that we can't be the world's policeman. But guess who gets called when somebody needs a cop.more General Colin Powell quotes |
