N. T. Wright Quotes

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.

Folks who talk about no violence are always the ones who are first to call a policeman and usually they are sure there is one handy.

In any country there must be people who have to die. They are the sacrifices any nation has to make to achieve law and order.

Thru the auspices of the viewers who become - I think this is an import - in a democracy, become a working unit with law enforcement against the criminals.

Why does everyone think that he can be decent enough without the policeman, but that the club is needed for "the others?

A people who are revolted by an execution, but not shocked at an assassination--require that the public authorities should be armed with much sterner powers of repression than elsewhere, since the first indispensable requisites of civilized life have nothing else to rest on.

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

… every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution.

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

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

Civil disobedience is the only nonviolent escape from the soul-destroying heat of violence.

The more killing and homicides you have, the more havoc it prevents.

Violence becomes imperative when an attempt is made to assert rights without any reference to duties.

We have to bring back respect to law enforcement.

Police ought to protect communities as well as individuals.... Just as physicians now recognize the importance of fostering health rather than simply treating illness, so the police - and the rest of us - ought to recognize the importance of maintaining, intact, communities without broken windows.

[A.J. Muste] never engaged in violence but he believed, as [Mahatma] Gandhi did - and he knew Gandhi slightly - he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community.

Reasoned and willing obedience to the laws of the State is the first lesson in non-co-operation.

Government is violence, Christianity is meekness, non-resistance, love. And, therefore, government cannot be Christian, and a man who wishes to be a Christian must not serve government.

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.

The function of violence is to obtain reform by external means, the function of passive resistance, that is, soul-force, is to obtain it by growth from within, which, in its turn, is obtained by self-suffering, self-purification.

Nonviolence becomes meaningless if violence is permitted for self-defence.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all.

Nonviolence in the sense of mere non-killing does not appear to me, therefore, to be of any improvement on the technique of violence.

Here's what I learned as a mayor and a governor. The way you make communities safer and the way you make police safer is through community policing. You build the bonds between the community and the police force, build bonds of understanding, and then when people feel comfortable in their communities, that gap between the police and the communities they serve narrows. And when that gap narrows, it's safer for the communities and it's safer for the police.