Quotes About Authority

The conventional view of a person's self-command structure is definitely bureaucratic, on the model of a corporation or an army, where superior agents simply pass commands down to inferior ones. However, closer examination of corporations and armies has shown that despite the establishment of hierarchical command structures, they remain marketplaces where officers must motivate rather than simply ordering behaviors.

When the computers developed, they would take over a good deal of the burden of the politicians, and sooner or later would also take over their power,

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

Where the people possess no authority, their rights obtain no respect.

If you consider how most churches deliver content—appointing one person as the authority and encouraging everyone else to sit (consume) quietly while he or she speaks—it is easy to see how that delivery system may come into conflict with changing cultural expectations.

For no one's authority ought to rank so high as to set a value on his words and terms even though nothing clear and determinate lies behind them.

The wheels of government go on, though wound up by different hands.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Common people do not pray, my lord: they only beg

Assassination: the extreme form of censorship.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

I was brought up to respect my elders, so now I don't have to respect anybody.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.