Quotes on Service, Police Work, and Humor

 

These touch on the different aspects of what it means to be in law enforcement.  The first one is my favorite.  It's not from a speech by a General or Police Chief or great leader of state, but from Charlotte's Web, a book usually read by young girls.  You don't find fellowship, existentialism, and dead flies in a paragraph very often. The fact that no street cop would ever say this out loud to another officer doesn't make it any less true.

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what's a life, anyway? We're born, we live a little while, we die. A spider's life can't help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone's life can stand a little of that. -E. B. White

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve. - Albert Schweitzer

... there are no terms to be made with sorrow. It can be cured by death and it can be blunted or anaesthetised by various things. Time is supposed to cure it, too. But if it is cured by anything less than death, the chances are that it was not true sorrow.
  ~Ernest Hemmingway

Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and Living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be. No good friends, No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build houses in your heart. - Stephen King

As long as they don't start requiring background checks for meat cleaver purchases, I'll be fine. - Charles Leonard

Do not assume that she who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good.  Her life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours.  Were it otherwise, she would never have been able to find these words.  Rainer Maria Rilke

There is a point at which everything becomes simple and there is no longer any question of choice, because all you have staked will be lost if you look back. Life's point of no return. -Unknown

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do. Eleanor Roosevelt

"The very existence of flame throwers proves that sometime,
somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to
set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close
enough to get the job done."
-George Carlin

Throughout history it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph. - Haile Selassie

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are.  I don't believe in circumstances.  The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, they make them.  - George Bernard Shaw

Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe, to know what he ought to desire, and to know what he ought to do. - St. Thomas Aquinas, Two Precepts of Charity

Believe me, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not; and often time we call a man cold, when he is only sad.  - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never, in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common, this is to be my symphony. - William Henry Channing

Eyes do not tell people what they see, people tell eyes what to look for.
  ~Larry McDonald

Defend mechanical adherence to routine and you defend complacency as a friend.
  ~Lance Struthers

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid.
  ~Soren Kierkegaard

Don't make fun of people who speak broken English, it means that they know another language.  Unknown

Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under it. ~William Shakespeare

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. ~Winston Churchill

It's hard to be brave when you're only a very small animal. ~Piglet

"To try may be to die, but not to care is never to be born."
-William Redfield

"Speaking for myself, my niece can't get enough of Hacker Barbie's Dream Basement Apartment! The pink Sun workstation in the corner, the little containers of takeout Szechuan scattered across the floor, her "Don't Blame Me, I Voted Libertarian" t-shirt -- it's on every little girl's Xmas list! To me, the most realistic thing is how if you put in her in the chair in front of the monitor, she'll stare at it for hours without blinking or taking her hands off the keyboard."
-Kurt Wm. Hemr

"Some people like Autumn because all the leaves change colors and everything look so pretty. I like it because everything dies."
-R.M. Weiner

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