Quotes About Authority

However, it was best known to the delegates as stated by the French thinker Montesquieu. He pointed out that When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or the same body of magistry, there can be no liberty; because apprehension may arise lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.

Whenever the cadaverous Home Office security supervisor became involved in their affairs, babies cried, women cowered, innocence was punished and blame was wrongly apportioned.

In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect.

The big companies dictate the terms and use their lawyers as henchmen.

We're the police, we don't thump people.

Crazy leaders teach us crazy habits.

To be tricked into thinking that you have freedom is worse than being told what to do.

But something about Baxter made people uneasy and therefore compliant. It had always been that way, but never more so than now. With his prison tats and those cold eyes, Baxter was the alpha dog in pretty much any room he entered.

Our holy prelates [say that God's Word] causeth insurrection and teacheth the people to disobey...and moveth them to rise against their princes, and to make all common, and to make havoc of other men's goods. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving as if they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not.

In order to be a part of the totalitarian mind-set, it is not necessary to wear a uniform or carry a club or a whip. It is only necessary to wish for your own subjection, and to delight in the subjection of others.

Terrorism works better as a tactic for dictatorships, or for would-be dictators, than for revolutionaries.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things…one of the beginnings of the human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority, its indispensable

In our time, the symbol of state intrusion into the private life is the mandatory urine test.

People know when they are being lied to, they know when their rulers are absurd, they know they do not love their chains.

The essence of tyranny is not iron law. It is capricious law.

As Shakespeare put it in 'King Lear,' the policeman who lashes the whore has a hot need to use her for the very offense for which he plies the lash.

The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is "systematic." The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not. (The only rule of thumb was: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.) Thus, the ruled can always be found to be in the wrong.

Control over the production and distribution of oil is the decisive factor in defining who rules whom in the Middle East.

The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one.