Quotes About Authority

All commands from your lips are sweet....

When we think we lead, we are most led.

The Court is most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or design of the Constitution.

Ante la burocracia somos todos extranjeros, (...) la burocracia es, en esencia (y en eso radica su utilidad), un código ajeno.

To know the pains of power, we must go to those who have it; to know its pleasures, we must go to those who are seeking it. The pains of power are real; its pleasures imaginary.

Eminence engenders enemies.

My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

Prestige is the shadow of money and power.

He rallied a little. "Who are you? What do you know about this? Disease control is our job, not yours. Who are you?" "My name," I said, mostly uner my breath, "is Siobhan Grainne MacNamarra Walkingstick, and I'm the answer to all your prayers.

The State in particular is turned into a quasi-animate personality from whom everything is expected. In reality it is only a camouflage for those individuals who know how to manipulate it.

Words like "Society" and "State" are so concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street, the "State," far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of all good; the "State" is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and so forth. Society is elevated to the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with positively creative capacities.

Not so very long ago there were medical authorities who did not "believe" in bacteria and consequently allowed twenty thousand young women to die of easily avoidable puerperal fever in Germany alone. The psychic catastrophes caused by the mental inertia of "experts" do not appear in any statistics, and from this it is concluded that they are non-existent.

It is perhaps a humiliating sign of spiritual immaturity that [modern] man needs, and wants, a large measure of authority.

statistical reality is the only one, then that is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgment and decision are not only superfluous but impossible.

If statistical reality is the only one, then that is the sole authority. There is then only one condition, and since no contrary condition exists, judgment and decision are not only superfluous but impossible. Then the individual is bound to be a function of statistics and hence a function of the State or whatever the abstract principle of order may be called.

omnipotence

It's not like our laws are moral codes—they're just a set of rules dreamed up by politicians to keep themselves in power and placate their contributors.

There were five commissioners.

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. —Aung San Suu Kyi, "Freedom from Fear

a Nean derthal with a badge.

It's inevitable that when there are hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats with endless budgets, who have no accountability and can't be fired, that these things are bound to happen.