Police Power Quotes

Congress constitutionally lacks general police powers.

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

I saw in the Nineties that we were increasing police power with get tough policies and 3 strikes laws, but without additional oversights.

The whole drug war is nothing but a pretext to increase police power and personnel, and that, of course, is dead wrong. So many created imagined drug offenses.

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.

The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state's Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order.

Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states--which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.

The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.

[Ayn] Rand accepts that when she supports military conscription, even indirectly. Also, she starts her politics from the premise that the State must have police power. She fails to take into account the inevitability that once you start with police power you're going to have a police State.

John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes of Wrath' also speaks urgently to today's concerns: the cratered trail of dreams for Mexican immigrants seeking a promised land in the Western [United States]; the perfidy of banks in foreclosing on poor people's homes; and the insurgent urge of the book's protagonist, Tom Joad, to speak truth to police power. 'Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy,' Tom promises, 'I'll be there.' In Salinas, Calif., Ferguson, Mo., or Staten Island, N.Y., Tom's truth goes marching on.

Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.

The thing that bugs me is that the people think the FDA is protecting them - it isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day.

September 11th does not justify ignoring the Constitution by creating broad new federal police powers. The rule of law is worthless if we ignore it whenever crises occur.

It is within the police power of the state to prohibit public use of fighting words that create a danger of breach of the peace, but simply to prohibit public use of fighting words is too broad. Those words may sometimes be used in situations where there is no danger.

The larger the state, the more callous it becomes... the colder its heart. It is also true that the bigger the corporation, the more callous its heart. But unlike the state, corporations have competition and have no police powers.

Remember, government is not an enlightened organization designed to promote public welfare. It is barbaric, uncivilized force…military and police power put to the service of the insiders who control it. Yes, there are constraints on the way the insiders use their power. There are ‘checks and balances,’ built into the constitution, for example. And there are cultural norms and traditional prohibitions. But eventually, the norms and traditions wear off, like painkillers. And then, the pain of raw government begins again.

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation’s largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.

I urge you to examine in your own mind the assumptions which must lay behind using the police power to insist that once-sovereign spirits have no choice but to submit to being schooled by strangers.

Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.

[I]t's up to Republicans to expose the bureaucracies and criticize the orthodoxies - to ask why visas for travel to the United States are still being issued in West Africa and why American military forces are being deployed there without a workable plan or intelligible purpose, why CDC spending priorities are so skewed and CDC management so weak, and why here at home routine police powers aren't being used and routine public health measures aren't being implemented.

To hold that Congress has general police power would be to hold that it may accomplish objects not intrusted to the general government, and to defeat the operation of the 10th Amendment, declaring that 'the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power.

The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.

The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.

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.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.