Quotes About Authority

Your Highness, what do you call it when a high-ranking person lies right in your face?" the President asked with a wry smile. "Diplomacy.

The pinnacle of power in China is the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the tiny body that sets policy for the nation's 1.4 billion citizens.

thing, most deadly of all to those who hold it in their earthly hands. For yourself, you must decide. What sort of leader do you wish to be, and with what other leaders

A bureaucrat who said no to everything rarely got in trouble.

Law, without force, is impotent.

It was so strange, how much fear there was in the world, and the most fearful of all were so often those who held the power in their hands.

He was master of all he surveyed. At least that was the phrase that came to mind, and with all such aphorisms it could be both true and false at the same time.

Torquemada seats.

Muy bien, jefe

can't take him up there for a short haircut." Hallston smiled coldly. "I doubt anyone

despite the green eyeshade and the garters on the sleeves.

Sir didn't mean anything, Kelly knew. When in doubt, a Marine would call a lightpole "Sir." He

the job was invented in order to make things easier for those at the top.

As far as I could tell, he earned his hundred thousand a year by wandering the hallway with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, smiling at the pretty girls and scowling at the boys who didn't play sports. Somebody should have stuck a broom in his hand and made him an honest man.

When you are called to lead, the last thing you want to do is vacillate, show fear, display weakness and indecisiveness, or fail to act.

The only authority I respect is the one that causes butterflies to fly south in fall and north in springtime.

Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.

Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.

It's hard to say who's a greater threat to the world, an ambitious CEO with a big ad budget or a crafty cleric with an obsolete Bible verse.

He who jokes in the executioners face can be destroyed, but never defeated.

The illusion of the seventh veil was the illusion that you could get somebody else to do it for you. To think for you. To hang on your cross. The priest, the rabbi, the imam, the swami, the philosophical novelist were traffic cops, at best. They might direct you through a busy intersection, but they wouldn't follow you home and park your car.

Are you to be an individual, a trespasser in territory none else has had the wit or nerve to explore, or just another troublesome mosquito to be swatted by the authorities?

Authority is to be ridiculed, outwitted and avoided.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make other people's decisions for them?