Arrest Quotes

“Art can blow us out of our pigeon hole. In deafness it may shout or scream, in blindness it may arrest our attention, in numbness it may shake up our mind. If we don’t sense anything at all and take everything for granted, art can kick us in the ass, give a conscience and make us aware. ("When is Art?")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Fear has always been a very important whistleblower. Our emotion and our history can provoke fear that may arrest us at any time or at any place. Above and beyond, fear might be contagious and its scent, sometimes sensual, sometimes mystical or animal, can exude the musty and arcane smell of destiny. ("One could still feel the smell of fear" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“You're under arrest for multiple counts of murder. You have the right to not much at all, really. Do you have anything to say in your defense?”
― Derek Landy, Mortal Coil

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Whether anybody comes to convince me or not
a part of my life does always ache
arresting my chest.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room.

The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death; I hate it, yet hug it in love. My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“I don’t make to-do lists, but if I did, today’s would have gone something like this: 1. get drunk, 2. get laid, 3. go surfing (not necessarily in that order.) Noticeably absent from the list: get arrested. And yet here I am, spending my eighteenth birthday with my back against the wall of the Colonel’s hunting cabin, two FBI agents prowling the dark with their guns drawn, both trying to get me to confess to the murder of my friend Preston DeWitt.”
― Paula Stokes, Liars, Inc.

“The real purpose of the opposition is to minimize the amount of money the ruling party will have stolen from the people at the end of its term.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I was constantly amazed by how many people talked me into arresting them.”
― Edward Conlon, Blue Blood by Conlon, Edward (2004) Paperback

“A police officer that is threatening you with arrest is setting you up for your arrest.”
― Steven Magee

“I already met my quota for live bodies. We’re not pursuing the ones who showed sense.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, A Pause in the Perpetual Rotation

“I was once abducted by a hospital patient that was under arrest by two police officers! The police officers left him alone with me while they were chatting up the nurses!”
― Steven Magee

“Do not be fearful when the police threaten you with arrest when you have done nothing wrong.”
― Steven Magee

“Multiple threats of arrest is how toxic police officers harass you.”
― Steven Magee

“When toxic police officers are threatening you with arrest when you have done nothing wrong, you have to think to yourself: What are they up to?”
― Steven Magee

“As soon as a police officer threatens me with arrest, my internal alarms start going off.”
― Steven Magee

“If a police officer threatens you with arrest when you are doing nothing wrong, you need to place a 911 call for a police supervisor.”
― Steven Magee

“Toxic police officers will elevate the situation with numerous threats of arrest in order to create a situation where they will arrest you when you are doing nothing wrong.”
― Steven Magee

“Three airport police officers threatened to arrest me eleven times while I was on my vacation and doing nothing wrong!”
― Steven Magee

“In a toxic encounter with police officers, I was threatened with arrest and jail eleven times!”
― Steven Magee

“It is important when a police officer is threatening to arrest you when you have done nothing wrong that you place a 911 call for a police supervisor before they do arrest you.”
― Steven Magee

“The top thing police officers do not want you to do is video record them.”
― Steven Magee

“The police need to learn that repeatedly threatening to arrest a person that is fully compliant is going to make life harder for them in the long term.”
― Steven Magee

“Being gay was illegal in the UK until 1982, you could go to jail for it!”
― Steven Magee

“I would always show up on Sunday morning, looking like hell after having partied all through the weekend without sleep. When I arrived, they would prime my inebriated carcass for church and drag me with them. And I’d prime myself by taking some sort of upper.
Sometimes I’d still fall asleep on the pew, but luckily, I was not the only one. After church, I would smile and strut my charm with the doting church mothers. I was so cunning about my addiction that most of them didn’t have a clue, other than the occasional rumor of an arrest, but those could easily be blamed on bad company. When I got home, I would sleep through the rest of the day and night until I finally awoke for school on Monday.”
― Michael J Heil, Pursued: God’s relentless pursuit and a drug addict’s journey to finding purpose

“عندما أعلم بعمليات قبض جديدة أعلم أن الدولة خائفة وأنها تريد أن تخفيف الملايين .. وهي أكثر منهم رعباً”
― مصطفى أمين, سنة رابعة سجن

“Suddenly, from behind the frosted glass of an adjacent room, a colleague appears. He's senior in rank, a captain. The captain holds out his hand for the passport and then starts brusquely looking through it. Yulia gives me a wry smile, as if to say, here we go. "Alexei Anatolievich, please come with me," the captain says. The expression on our lawyer's face reflects what she is thinking about the failure of our cunning plan. She is standing literally centimeters away, but already on the far side of the barrier that symbolizes the state border. She tries to open it and come back in, but it is obviously locked and can only be opened by pressing a button in the border guard's cubicle.

"Why do you want me to go with you?" I ask.
"We need to establish certain details."
"Well, what's the problem with establishing them here?"
"You need to come with me."

Do you take me for a complete fool? I think. If you've decided to arrest me, bring out your cops, of whom you doubtless have a squad at the ready. They want to avoid a photograph of the police taking me away.

"I don't have to go anywhere with you," I say. "Here is my lawyer. I insist you establish your details or whatever it is in her presence." We bicker some more, and I can see the pain in the captain's eyes. He is under instructions to get me to walk through that adjacent door-with no photos of policemen-but he is clearly not going to be able to deliver. He mutters something into his handset, and six policemen magically appear. Olga begins attacking the barrier even more energetically, demanding to be let back in. Just in case, I move Yulia, who is standing between me and the police, behind my back. Heaven knows what they may have in mind.

The altercation continues, now with a police major, and by now I am on autopilot. This routine of "Come with me," "No," "Come," "No, I don't have to. Here is my lawyer," "No, come with me" is something I know so well I could repeat it in my sleep. What is important right now is to think strategically. I have a single-use mobile phone in my pocket (I feel it). Kira has the backpack with the laptop. I give the suitcase to Yulia; it is unlikely she will be detained too. That seems to be everything. I am ready. I say goodbye to Yulia, kissing her on the cheek.

The standard dialogue has already reached the stage of "If you refuse to comply with the instructions of police officers, forcible action will be taken." There is no point in refusing to go with them and be dragged off by the arms and legs like at protest rallies. What if all they are planning to do is hand me a summons to appear in court? In fifteen minutes the whole confrontation would look pretty silly. I kiss Yulia again and go on my way, accompanied by an escort of police.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“This routine of "Come with me," "No," "Come," "No, I don't have to. Here is my lawyer," "No, come with me" is something I know so well I could repeat it in my sleep. What is important right now is to think strategically. I have a single-use mobile phone in my pocket (I feel it). Kira has the backpack with the laptop. I give the suitcase to Yulia; it is unlikely she will be detained too. That seems to be everything. I am ready. I say goodbye to Yulia, kissing her on the cheek.

The standard dialogue has already reached the stage of "If you refuse to comply with the instructions of police officers, forcible action will be taken." There is no point in refusing to go with them and be dragged off by the arms and legs like at protest rallies. What if all they are planning to do is hand me a summons to appear in court? In fifteen minutes the whole confrontation would look pretty silly. I kiss Yulia again and go on my way, accompanied by an escort of police....

Everyone in Russia is familiar with the phrase "a theater performance for one spectator." It starts within a few seconds. Two characters in plain clothes turn on cameras, while a third (you call tell he is in charge from his jacket) produces some papers, goes over to the major, and begins solemnly intoning, "Comrade blah blah blah, I report that in the case of blah blah blah there is blah blah blah evidence, blah blah blah Navalny, blah blah blah search." Having absorbed this, the major turns to the border guard, who reports that based on a review of blah blah blah documents citizen Navalny has been identified.

At this I start laughing at them. "Why are you behaving like lunatics? Who are you putting this shown on for? There's only me here; relax and speak normally," I say. They cannot relax, however, because of those two cameras filming the proceedings. Their superiors, who have scripted this performance, are invisibly present in their camera proxies. Nobody reacts to my words.”
― Alexei Navalny, Patriot: A Memoir

“Freedom is a treasure one should never trade for bondage through crime.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Sips And Little Portions

“He had no alibi for the night of November 8, 1974, and he argued, "If I cannot remember precisely what occurred on a date which is now eighteen and one-half months prior to my arrest for kidnapping, it is because my memory does not improve with time. It is safe to say what I was not doing, however. I was not having heart surgery, nor was I taking ballet lessons, nor was I in Mexico, no was I abducting a complete stranger at gunpoint. There are just some things a person does not forget and just some things a person is not inclined to do under any circumstances.”
― Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy: The Shocking Inside Story