Jacques Ellul Quotes

Nanny states are interested in social order. Daddy states are interested in public order.

A State is not morally free to allow anarchy and license ... even if the majority should so desire.

It is not the State that orders us; but it is we who order the State!

The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not.

If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of majority. That's the way it's done in the U.S., and that's the way it's done in Russia.

I deplore the need or the use of troops anywhere to get American citizens to obey the orders of constituted courts.

The organization of order is not the exclusive monopoly of the State

One must be stark mad, to believe that mankind can subsist without magistrates.

What is going to rule our great commonwealth, the mob or the law?

In a sense, the police power is but another name for the power of government.

Any law enforcement authority can only be of value if the people support the law enforcement authority.

The basic principle that governs the relation between a state and its people --a total and unconditional subordination and submission of individuals and classes to the state…

What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

It's a social contract we make. We're willing to give up certain things. We give you the right to tax us. We give you the right to lock us up. We give you the right to put us on surveillance, search our homes, whatever and, in exchange, we get a functioning society that keeps us relatively safe, and that's the tradeoff we make.

There is all the difference in the world between the nonviolence that the ordinary Christian should embrace and the duty of civic authorities to police their communities. The end of Romans 12 is quite clear about the first; the start of Romans 13 is quite clear about the second.

The state reserves the right to be the sole interpreter of the needs of society.

I'M CONFUSED, because I don't know why it's so hard to obey a policeman. You will not win!!! And I don't know why some policeman abuse their power. Power is a responsibility, not a weapon to brandish and lord over the populace.

I think most Americans have an innate respect for the police and for their authority.

You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you.

The power that keeps cities of men together Is noble preservation of law.

Any society has to delegate the responsibility to maintain a certain kind of order. Enforcing regulations, making sure people stop at stoplights. We can’t function as a society without rules and regulations, and the enforcement mechanism of those rules and regulations.

However fiercely opposed one may be to the present order, an old respect for the idea of order itself often prevents people from distinguishing between order and those who stand for order, and leads them in practice to respect individuals under the pretext of respecting order itself.

In its narrowest acceptation, order means obedience. A government is said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed.

Every new development for the last three centuries has brought men closer to a state of affairs in which absolutely nothing would be recognized in the whole world as possessing a claim to obedience except the authority of the State. The majority of people in Europe obey nothing else.

The function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association of individuals within the State. It is by this means that it maintains liberty of expression, security of person and property, genuine freedom of contract, the rights of public meeting and association, and finally its own power to carry out common objects undefeated by the recalcitrance of individual members.