Great Quotes III: Source and Context are Key

[SS-18 ICBM]

"1. To prevent crime and disorder, as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.

2. To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.

3. To recognise always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing co-operation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.

4. To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.

5. To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

6. To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public co-operation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.

7. To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that 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.

8. To recognise always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.

9. To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them."
-Peelian Principles of policing

 

[Borachio]

Ooh. That's very interesting. I'd not read that before.

Nothing explicit about the preservation of private property, I see. Which was the express purpose of the Bow Street Runners (started by Henry Fielding? Well, I never!), and the Watchmen, I think.

 

[Thorvald of Lym]

Godspeed, Mulcair.

 

[bhsup]

"But it's not till someone quotes you that you can be considered a quote maker."

- Borachio

 

[gay_Aleks]

Doesn't that theoretically belong to Brought To You By CFC?

 

[Phrossack]

"You stupid Greeks, I have known your cunning ways for long enough. The late sultan was a lenient and conscientious friend to you. The present sultan Mehmed is not of the same mind. If Constantinople eludes his bold and impetuous grip, it will only be because God continues to overlook your devious and wicked schemes.

You are fools to think that you can frighten us with your fantasies when the ink on our recent treaty of peace is barely dry. We are not children without strength or sense. If you think that you can start something, do so. If you want to proclaim Orhan as sultan in Thrace, go ahead. If you want to bring the Hungarians across the Danube, let them come. If you want to recover places that you lost long since, try it. But know this: you will make no headway in any of these things. All that you will do is lose what little you have."

-Çandarlı Halil Pasha the Younger, in a letter to Emperor Constantine XI

 

[Tee Kay]

"The nation has placed its faith in the precept that all laws should be inspired by actual needs here on earth as a basic fact of national life."

- Mustafa Kemal

Legislations guided by reality. Revolutionary stuff then, still revolutionary now it seems.

 

[Traitorfish]

Just try not to be an ethnic minority, I guess.

 

[Tee Kay]

Just try not to be an ethnic minority, I guess.

From the perspective of a member of the ruling class in an ethno-centric nation-state surrounded by other ethno-centric nation-states, clensing or otherwise neutralising ethnic minorities makes perfect practical sense.

Being realistic is not the same as being moral.

 

[Kyriakos]

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveller.

*****

 

[Borachio]

Wut?

What did he mean by that? Who does the "traveller" refer to?

 

[Kyriakos]

Wut?

What did he mean by that? Who does the "traveller" refer to?

Not sure. As you know many of his aphorisms are rather dark and can be viewed in different ways..

I suppose that part of the meaning is that there is no actual 'history' other than what anyone individually carries as a sense of a history. Now this would be a bit trite if it just refers to there being no definitive point of view on history, so likely it alludes to a more general illusion of any specifically identified development (?).

To project a bit more: maybe the history is brought to be artificially as a sense, much like it would be artificial and hyperbolic for a traveller to note and examine something between any two of his strides.

 

[Traitorfish]

"Man, don't you know? The laws ain't made to help earthy cats like us. Here on our planet, back in the old days- back in the real old days- it was every man for himself, scrooblin' and scrat-scoblin' for the good stuff, the greenest valleys. And the strongest, meanest men got the best stuff. They got the greenest valleys and were like 'The rest of you, y'all scrats get the sand.' And that's when they made the laws, you see. Once the strong guys got it how they liked, they said 'This is fair now. This is the law.' Once they were winning, the changed the rules up."

- Jake the Dog, Adventure Time.

Spoiler :

 

[Kyriakos]

^Those are two different kinds of 'strong'. Nietzsche's 'The Genealogy of Ethics' has this as the main subject, ie how the archaic ethics likely were more directly an echo of somatic strength and warlike qualities- and healthy life- while what he terms as the christian ethics were 'the revenge of the pariah' against anything viable and strong.

I think that it is in general true. Of course no one is the actual archetype of those qualities, but it seems that more verminous people rose to power, and are still holding it now.

 

[Borachio]

“The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more its inside you.”

― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

 

[Kyriakos]

"ἐν φρέατι κυνομαχεῖν"

(dogfighting inside a well/pit).

Cool ancient proverb, meaning that one's situation is so bad that even if he got out of it he would still have another huge barrier to deal with- like if he was a dog fighting another dog, inside a pit or a deep well.

There is an excellent story by De Maupassant about a dog they pushed into such a pit, to be left to die. There it was combating another dog, for the scraps of food people would occasionally throw to the pit.

 

[bhsup]

So basically, "Out of the frying pan and into the fire" in Greek?

 

[Kyriakos]

Sort of, yes. Although the fire would kill you whereas the well is a (by itself neutral) barrier/obstacle.

 

[Kyriakos]

All was so silent by that unvalued house that the faded courage of Tonker flickered up, but to Nuth's experienced sense it seemed too silent; and all the while there was that look in the sky that was worse than a spoken doom, so that Nuth, as is often the case when men are in doubt, had leisure to fear the worst. Nevertheless he did not abandon the business, but sent the likely lad with the instruments of his trade by means of the ladder to the old green casement. And the moment that Tonker touched the withered boards, the silence that, though ominous, was earthly, became unearthly like the touch of a ghoul. And Tonker heard his breath offending against that silence, and his heart was like mad drums in a night attack, and a string of one of his sandals went tap on a rung of a ladder, and the leaves of the forest were mute, and the breeze of the night was still; and Tonker prayed that a mouse or a mole might make any noise at all, but not a creature stirred, even Nuth was still. And then and there, while yet he was undiscovered, the likely lad made up his mind, as he should have done long before, to leave those colossal emeralds where they were and have nothing further to do with the lean, high house of the gnoles, but to quit this sinister wood in the nick of time and retire from business at once and buy a place in the country. Then he descended softly and beckoned to Nuth. But the gnoles had watched him through knavish holes that they bore in trunks of the trees, and the unearthly silence gave way, as it were with a grace, to the rapid screams of Tonker as they picked him up from behind -- screams that came faster and faster until they were incoherent. And where they took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say.

http://www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacdonald/d_nuth.htm

 

[gay_Aleks]

"One of the things we tried to do with [Monty Python's Flying Circus] was to try and do something that was so unpredictable that it had no shape and you could never say what the kind of humor was. And I think that the fact that 'Pythonesque' is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed."
— Terry Jones at the US Comedy Arts Festival, 1998