“Her crime was having elbows, breasts, and epilepsy." - Assistant District Attorney Erin Choi
“It’s time to send a message about white privilege.” - Cyrus Vance Jr., sipping deeply from a cool glass of delicious irony
“If this won’t provoke them, I’m out of ideas.” - consulting detective Ray Kelly
“The jurors are
sorry? Were they instructed to think nothing would come of it?” - a fifth-grade civics class
"The criminal justice system is a system of political repression. The war on drugs, stop-and-frisk, spying on Muslims, discriminatory use of hate crime laws against the very same people they're ‘supposed’ to protect, spurious warrants used to terrorize poor families and to pre-emptively arrest activists, entrapment of mentally disabled 'terrorists' and teenage anarchists, Ramarley Graham, Trayvon Martin, it’s all the same. Cops are the bad guys, and prosecutors and judges are just pigs in white collars. I hope that now that this lesson has been presented to you, white liberals, in a form resembling yourselves, you will finally remember it. I can’t make it any clearer to you than this." - Judge Ronald Zweibel
“I don’t see what the big deal is, we all know that police oppression, however regrettable, is acceptable under the cost-benefit analysis of Progressivism.” - Bill de Blasio
"To call the McMillan verdict a 'miscarriage of justice' slanders justice by associating it with courts. To criticize it as obscene is superfluous. Obscenity, and American Puritanical delight therein, is the point. The medium is the message." - George Zimmerman
"For defending herself, a victim of sexual assault was prosecuted by a women and convicted by a jury that was two-thirds female. The system works!" - Candidate Clinton
"I knew the Defendant was guilty when I heard evidence that she had ordered a full pint at the local pub instead of a Lady's half-pint."
- NeoVictorian Juror No. 6
“Exercising her
rights?! Dressed like
that?! Your honor, when my two favorite askings-for-it converged in the body of the same woman, I just couldn’t help myself!” - Police Officer Grantley Bovell
“You have the right to remain an unorganized jelly without stimulus response, legal recourse, or social recognition.” - the Constitution of the United States
“What would happen if instead of taking plea bargains, everyone demanded a trial? Some say that the criminal justice system would be paralyzed by gridlock, and a valuable lesson learned by all, but this strikes me as a little naive. Things would just look more like Egypt.”
“Ah, but this is what the Egyptians don’t understand: You don’t
need show trials.”
- Andrew Cuomo and Eric Holder before being shushed at a screening of
Triumph of the Will, Anthology Film Archives
“America was founded on the idea that everyone is free to do what they want as long as they don’t infringe upon the freedom of others to do the same. What is freedom but power, the power of individuals to pursue their own happiness, and what is State Power but the guarantor of this freedom, and, therefore, font of all freedom? What about Power--
it's rights,
it's freedom,
it's happiness?! Was not Miss McMillan, in exercising her right of free speech, infringing on the rights of Power, it’s freedom to rule, to make us free!?!” - Jon Stewart “finding common ground” with Bill O’Reilly over a thousand tiny beers at McSorley’s
“Rizzo lives!” - Wall Street graffito
“Better to drop bombs on African-American neighborhoods in Hell than beat a white woman with a club in heaven. - Frank Rizzo
“We need a Bull Connor of the Left.” - Michael Bloomberg
"Any hesitation whatsoever in complying with the physical aggression of a police officer upon one’s person is criminal. If you so much as flinch when a pig’s hand brushes your genitals in a routine stop-and-frisk, you’ll find your face on the curb. Punch a cop who gropes your breast, you could be facing seven year in jail. Pigs expect obedience that is beyond--no,
beneath--canine. A dog one expects to have to train. From a human, pigs expect instinctive submission--an ecstatic, organic synchrony of will between master and slave. The pig believes his touch is never wrong and that this is something everyone should know in their very nerve endings. In short, pigs think everyone is just as servile as they are. " - Rudy Giuliani, consulting webinar
“We pigs are constitutionally indignant, you see. Skepticism towards power is not the foundation of democracy, but a betrayal of it. Doubt is an admission of guilt. Don't people read the social contract before they sign it?” - Teddy Roosevelt in bed with a horse
"Power is the death of life and the death of death. Who holds a club or wears a gun is my brother. The law is my slogan. The asp is my sign. The trial is my protest, the protest of power against the powerless. The way I am is the way people oughta be.” - Fraternal Order of the NYPD, initiatory rites
“‘Joy is an animal doing what it is trained to do,’ says Liam Neeson. Pigs agree.” - the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association
“Yes, the police are the private army of the State and, by extension, of the vested interests and ruling cliques that run it, and, yes, the police are ultimately the instrument of larger, impersonal systems of economic, racial, gender-based, sexuality-regulating, technoscientific, and biopolitical domination, all those things are true, but, never forget, at the end of the day, the police fights for itself, which is not at all the same thing as saying that we fight for the law. Every arrest is a ritual that creates the problem—the ‘need’ for police—that it seems to solve. Do bad things happen? Do people sometimes need to be stopped doing what they are doing, immediately and even forcefully if necessary? Yes, of course. But why should this responsibility—which is nothing but the responsibility that all people have to each other—be delegated to a professionalized paramilitary force? How much more powerful a deterrent would it be for a person to know that if she were to transgress, she would implicate the entire community into having to deal with her? The police exist to atomize society, to disrupt the communism that is always there as the social default, waiting to be realized.” - Bill Bratton, speech to new recruits
“Are all cops really pigs? Aren’t you exaggerating? What is it you
want?
No police? What would we do then, without a police force to
protect us from each other? We’d all just, what?
Get along? Take care of
one another? Work through our differences? What about
my rights?!”
- Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2006
