Our Centers for Ethics:

Quotations: Policing, law enforcement, crime

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The intention makes the crime.
— Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384-322 B.C.)

The streets are safe in Philadelphia. It's only the people that make them unsafe.
— Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia mayor and police commissioner (1920-1991)

We live in a stage of politics where legislators seem to regard the passage of laws as much more important than the results of their enforcement.
— William Howard Taft, 27th American president (1857-1930)

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
— Calvin Coolidge, 30th American president (1872-1933)

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.
— Albert Camus, French existentialist novelist (1913-1960)

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.
— Albert Einstein, Swiss-American mathematician, physicist and public philosopher (1879-1955)

There are not enough jails, not enough police, not enough courts to enforce a law not supported by the people.
— Hubert H. Humphrey, 38th American vice president (1911-1978)

Who will protect the public when the police violate the law?
— Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General (b. 1927)

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.
— attributed to Thomas B. Reed

The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
— Sir Robert Peel, British Prime Minister (1788-1850) 

The police must obey the law while enforcing the law.
— Earl Warren, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1891-1974)

The duties which a police officer owes to the state are of a most exacting nature. No one is compelled to choose the profession of a police officer, but having chosen it, everyone is obliged to live up to the standard of its requirements. To join in that high enterprise means the surrender of much individual freedom.
— Calvin Coolidge, 30th American president (1872-1933)

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral values and obligations, neither the law nor democratic government will function properly.
— Vaclav Havel, President, Czech Republic

Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
— Sir Robert Peel, British Prime Minister (1788-1850)

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer.
— William Blackstone, British jurist (1723-1780)

Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches people by example. If the government becomes the law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law and invites every man to become a law unto himself.
— Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1856-1941)

My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains ... put it down, Joe.
— Humphrey Bogart, American actor (1899-1957), from The Big Sleep

He that’s cheated twice by the same man is an accomplice with the cheater.
— Thomas Fuller, English divine and author (1608-1661)

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