Quotes About Authority

There is something wrong with coppers' I said. 'You can't punch them in the jaw when you want to.

You know how to fire this?" he asked. Thomas took Ulysses's gun. It looked absurdly large in his thin hands, but he released the safety like a professional. "My father taught me," he explained. "Good." Ulysses turned to the man kneeling before him. "This boy's in charge now. You'll do as he says. If you don't--as you can see, his father taught him how to shoot you.

The Bible was perfectly clear on this point: 'Woman shall be silent in the congregation.' What was there to discuss? Women had no business being members of the clergy.

The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture

La historia tiene ya el número de páginas suficientes para enseñarnos dos cosas: que jamás los poderosos coincidieron con los mejores, y que jamás la política (contra todas las apariencias) fue tejida por los políticos (meros canalizadores de la inercia histórica).

To a young man who has in himself the magnificent possibilities of life, it is not fitting that he should be permanently commanded. He should be a commander. JAMES A. GARFIELD

As is true of most men who wield their power like a weapon, Conkling was widely feared, slavishly obeyed, and secretly despised.

is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.

Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles.

Where law ignores instinct, instinct rebels and subverts order.

There's two hundred million people out there just walkin' around," he'd say ruefully. "And there ain't nobody in charge.

For, in order to turn the individual into a function of the State, his dependence on anything besides the State must be taken from him. But religion means dependence on and submission to the irrational facts of experience.

Jimmy Lee Baylis was a wise man, and knew better than to talk back to the man who signed his paycheck.

The infantile dream-state of the mass man is so unrealistic that he never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes.

Practical experience and accurate observation show that one cannot influence one's own dreams. There are people, it is true, who assert that they can influence them. But if you look into their dream material, you find that they do only what I do with my disobedient dog: I order him to do those things I notice he wants to do anyhow, so that I can preserve my illusion of authority.

Thus, it is the listener and not the speaker who decides how powerful a threat will be.

Where in my life am I not taking full ownership? Another way to ask it is: What am I trying to disown? Or: What aspect of my life do I need to take full ownership of?

I am running the show. Everyone is waiting for me. I decide. I know this now.

I was tired of being in the charge of cruel and clueless adults. The world was upside down. The adults had abandoned their roles. They'd surrounded themselves in a cocoon of ignorance--and then told us we were screwed up. We couldn't trust them anymore. There was nobody out there watching out for us, taking care of us. We had to look out for ourselves.

One is struck again and again, in all the historical documents, by how small the Gestapo organisation really was, by how the Nazis repressed the entire German population with such a relatively small apparatus – particularly compared to, for example, the East German Stasi later in the same century. The Stasi employed more than 100,000 people to keep an eye on 17 million East Germans, while the Gestapo apparently needed no more than 40–60,000 for an empire of some 80 million

Hitler's regime maintained its generally accepted authority in Germany almost until the bitter end. In fact, large parts of the population supported that regime enthusiastically. Resistance was so uncommon that it could easily be nipped in the bud. Propaganda was readily believed, repression was a matter of loving one's country, obedience was the rule, informing on neighbours a patriotic duty.

In the immortal words of Mr. Burns.......eeeeexcellent.

Men. One minute they have their tongues down your throat and the next they're forbidding you from meeting your own father and criticizing your fashion choices.

He is neither a strategist nor is he schooled in the operational arts, nor is he a tactician, nor is he a general. Other than that he's a great military man. (describing Saddam Hussein of Iraq, 1991)