Justice & Law Quote by Jacques Prevert

A poet’s sentence that lands like a baton. Prevert frames “truth” not as an abstract virtue but as a public utility: something that has to circulate freely to mean anything at all. “When truth is no longer free” doesn’t just suggest censorship; it implies truth has been priced, rationed, or seized. Once speech becomes a controlled substance, “freedom” survives only as a label on the bottle.

The pivot is the colon, a guillotine drop. Prevert moves from diagnosis to indictment: “the truths of the police are the truths of today.” It’s a line that understands how modern power works - not only by silencing dissent, but by manufacturing a default reality. Police “truth” here is not the patient work of evidence; it’s the institutional version of truth: the report, the file, the official narrative that arrives pre-stamped with legitimacy. His plural - “truths,” not “truth” - matters. It suggests a set of convenient stories, adjustable to the needs of order.

Context sharpens the charge. Prevert, a surrealist-adjacent writer with leftist sympathies, lived through interwar political violence, the rise of authoritarian propaganda, the Occupation, and postwar state policing. In that century, “security” repeatedly masqueraded as neutrality. The line’s subtext is that freedom doesn’t vanish in one dramatic coup; it erodes when the state’s version of events becomes the only version that counts. Prevert’s warning is cultural as much as political: once institutions monopolize reality, citizens are reduced to spectators of their own lives.