Justice & Law Quote by Jack Nicholson

Nicholson’s line lands because it’s delivered like streetwise wisdom, not a confession: a punchy “rule” that dares you to laugh before you can audit the morals. The ellipsis is the tell. It mimics a pause for fake profundity, then swerves into a taboo pairing - state authority and intimate partnership - collapsing two very different kinds of power into the same category: people who can punish you.

As an actor, Nicholson has long sold a particular American archetype: the charming menace, the grinning outlaw who understands the system well enough to game it. Here, the “police” represent institutional force - the part of society that can make your day legally disappear. The “girlfriend” stands in for domestic accountability, the private sphere where you’re judged not by laws but by expectations, jealousy, and emotional leverage. The joke is that both relationships are framed as adversarial. It’s cynical, and it’s engineered to sound practical.

The subtext is gendered and era-specific: girlfriend, not partner; deception, not negotiation. It plays into a mid-century to late-20th-century masculinity that treats intimacy as management and women as gatekeepers of consequences. That’s why it still gets quoted - it’s a one-liner that flatters the speaker as savvy - and why it curdles on replay. The laugh comes from recognition of an ugly strategy: if you think power is always out to get you, lying becomes a survival skill. Nicholson’s genius is making that bleak worldview feel like a wink.