Quotes About Authority

I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City.

Thing is, just because you make a body shiver don't make it yours.

For all that they love to make kings, John's folk seem to have little interest in the actual business of ruling anything. They like to become, they do not like to be.

Being the oldest sometimes meant being everyone's boss, but mostly, it meant being everyone's pack mule.

If you don't leave now, I'll call the

traditional institutions on almost every level: hierarchy

This criminal government doesn't want guns in the hands of people who can think for themselves.

Secret knowledge equals power, with the end result being control.

Like the rich boarding school kid who gets away with a hit-and-run, getting away with it doesn't mean that you're lawless but that you are above the law. The bad-boy artist can do whatever he wants because of who he is. Transgressive bad-boy art is, in fact, the most risk-averse, an endless loop of warmed-over stunts for an audience of one: the banker collector.

I cannot count the number of times I have seen my parents condescended to or mocked by white adults. This was so customary that when my mother had any encounter with a white adult, I was always hypervigilant, ready to mediate or pull her away. To grow up Asian in America is to witness the humiliation of authority figures like your parents and to learn not to depend on them: they cannot protect you.

Other ayatollahs considered the female voice arousing and barred women from speaking in mixed gatherings unless they first put a stone in their mouths to distort the sound. Khomeini,

By the time the seasons turned through four more reapings, he had been crowned king of Yudah. By the time I was counted a man, he had added the crown of the kingdom of Israel

Censura praevia or censura repressiva, the effect is the same. Either way, a book is destroyed. Better you do it than have us so intellectually enslaved that we do it for you.

They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The

fundamentalists asked that a male answer questions directed to her, on the grounds that a woman's voice is too alluring to be heard in mixed company. Nadia

Such laws can be even more humiliating for older women. A widowed grandmother, for example, may have to rely on the permission of a grandson if he is her closest male relative.

The wishes and desires of the powerful can be fickle things. I knew this. But I knew it in that deep place where one hides knowledge that is inconvenient, or too painful to admit, even to oneself.

The stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip.

No one sits, as you do, so close to a king, who does not begin to grasp how the levers of power work, and the cost of the oil that must grease them.

The women have been told it's written in the Koran that they must do these things," she said. She could tell them it wasn't but, as an outsider and a woman, her word meant little against the word of the village sheik.

It's remarkable how very many things there are that a king may not do.

If you want to please me very much, you will fall down when I shoot you," -Oates The White Darkness

Liberty has never come from the government," Wilson had told his audience. "Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it.

So many people treat you like you're a kid that you might as well act like one and throw your television out of the hotel window.