Quotes About Authority

I may be kindly, I am ordinarily gentle, but in my line of business I am obliged to will terribly what I will at all.

We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say: lines on maps are silly.

Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

Just remember that the only question in a house is who is to rule. The rest is only dancing around that, trying not to look it in the eye.

It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.

True names," said September wonderingly. "These are all true names. Like, when your parents call you to dinner and you don't come and they call again but you still don't come, and they call you by all your names together, and then, of course, you have to come, and right quick. Because true names have power, like Lye said. But I never told anyone my true name. The Green Wind told me not to. I didn't understand what he meant, but I do now.

Everyone is a criminal! We are beset on all sides by antirevolutionary forces. Naturally, then, humans fall into three categories: the criminal, the not-yet-criminal, and the not-yet-caught.

Did I not come to you on my knees with a kingdom in my hand?

Histories are instruments of oppression.

That's what happens to the old guard, my pup. You can always count on it. We who serve, we who make the world run. When the world changes, it stashes us away where we can't make it run the other way again.

Shut up," hissed the Marquess. "I chose it, you miserable, rouged-up idiots! Why shouldn't I have a boy's title? People listen to boys! They fear boys—they fear a King and hope a Queen will show them mercy! Why shouldn't I be a Marquess? I rule the world! I say how things are pronounced! I say what belongs to boys and what doesn't!

I have to know, I have to or else you will just rule me until the end of everything because you know and I do not.

She was a vengeful goddess and her will was absolute.

Truth is: I was always that kind of girl. Truth is: they don't make dresses any whiter than mine. Truth is: I am not Demeter's daughter. I am Heisenberg's ripe tomato I am Niels Bohr's piece on the side. In the winter I am a particle. In the summer I am a wave. And I didn't get to be queen of hell by letting folks off easy.

And that is the last lesson of childhood: You spend all your years fighting against the injustice of big folk and their big rules until you are ready to rule yourself.

The oligarchs do not care what justice is, only what seems just. They do not care what mercy is, only what appears merciful. Thus justice and mercy will always escape them.

It's different. When you make a house good and strong because it's your house, a place you made, a place you're proud of, it's not at all the same as making it glow for someone who ordered you to do it.

God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that's all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God.

That's how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl—they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.

When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.

Mabry Muscat looked pleadingly at Mallow, and she could not understand why they all obeyed him -- except that of course the King could eat them, and of course he was King, and did not people everywhere do more or less as they were told when someone with a crown did the telling?

Lawlessness doesn't mean there's no law, you know, it just means that there are a lot of different laws slugging it out in the streets, and none of them have come out on top yet.

Why is it safe for you and not for me?" whispered Marya Morevna. "Because you're still a girl." The vintovnik grinned. "Girls have to obey rules. Chyerti break them.

Doesn't sound like anyone cares about Rightful until they want to kick someone else out of the chair.