Quotes About Obedience

O my God, teach me to be generous, teach me to serve you as I should, to give without counting the cost, to fight without fear of being wounded, to work without seeking rest, to labour without expecting any reward, but the knowledge that I am doing your most holy will.

What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.

Holiness consists simply in doing God's will, and being just what God wants us to be.

Get out of the way of justice. She is blind.

It is easy to ignore responsibility when one is only an intermediate link in a chain of action.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person's wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.

But the culture has failed, almost entirely, in inculcating internal controls on actions that have their origin in authority. For this reason, the latter constitutes a far greater danger to human survival.

It has been reliably established that from 1933 to 1945 millions of innocent people were systematically slaughtered on command. Gas chambers were built, death camps were guarded, daily quotas of corpses were produced with the same efficiency as the manufacture of appliances. These inhumane policies may have originated in the mind of a single person, but they could only have been carried out on a massive scale if a very large number of people obeyed orders.

The importation and enslavement of millions of lack people, the destruction of the American Indian population, the internment of Japanese American, the use of napalm against civilians in Vietnam, all are harsh policies that originated in the authority of a democratic nation, and were responded to with the expected obedience.

Tyrannies are perpetuated by diffident men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs.

There is a propensity for people to accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority

is not what subjects do but for whom they are doing it that counts.

There is a certain discomfort in not knowing who the boss is, and subjects sometimes frantically sought to determine this.

we sometimes have a choice among authorities, and we ought to look at this phenomenon within the experiment. It is possible that when different authorities simultaneously call for opposing lines of action, a person's own values will prevail and determine which authority he follows. Or

It is clear that the disagreement between the authorities completely paralyzed action. Not

Behavior prior to this rupture is termed obedience. The point of rupture is the act of disobedience.

The claim 'I was only following orders' has been used to justify too many tragedies in our history.

I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled "Heil Schuschnigg" today would thunder "Heil Hitler" tomorrow.

All the bourgeois virtues, caution, obedience, zeal and thoughtfulness- they all melt away powerless in the fire of the great fateful moment that always demands only genius and forms it into a a lasting image. Contemptuously it repulses the timid man; it, another god of the earth, with fiery arms, lifts only the bold into the heaven of heroes.

the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be.

In Germany, in France, in Italy, in Russia, and in Belgium, they all obediently served the war propaganda and thus the mass delusion and mass hatred, instead of fighting against it.

In obedience there is always fear, and fear darkens the mind.