Quotes About Authority

Intimida a ese fanfarrón timador, llamado Azar, Y comanda la tirana circunstancia Sin corona, y rellena el lugar de un sirviente.

He only is fitted to command and control who has succeeded in commanding and controlling himself.

Nothing ever works out when you are at the whims of others. It doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur or an employee. Once someone is bribing you to do something (a salary is a form of bribery if you are only doing the work for the money and not for the meaning) then you become a prisoner.

stand straight and act like someone who deserves to be listened to).

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. When everyone spills their guts, they lose their sight. The one who holds on to this very precious resource becomes the one-eyed man, the king.

Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

The moral authority in the Western world is gone. And it is gone forever. It is gone, not because of the criminal record--everybody's record is criminal. It is gone because you cannot do one thing and pretend you're doing another! None of us, who are sitting around in some of the true limbo out-of-space, which we call now, waiting to be saved, civilized, or discovered, have the moral authority to say anything.

All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

He may be a very nice man. But I haven't got the time to figure that out. All I know is, he's got a uniform and a gun and I have to relate to him that way. That's the only way to relate to him because one of us may have to die.

For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for, and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.

Anyway, I have long had a very definite tendency to tune out the moment I come anywhere near either a pulpit or a soapbox.

It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have. --The Price of the Ticket, "No Name in the Street" (1972; repr. 1985)     The

But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

How can one... dream of power in any other terms than in the symbols of power?

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.

Every effort made by the child's elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be "good" not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel.

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State.

He wanted to be master, to speak with authority which could only come from God. it was later to become his proud testimony that he hated his sins - even as he ran towards sin, even as he sinned. He hated the evil that lived in his body, and he feared it, as he feared and hated the lions of lust and longing that prowled the defenseless city of his mind.

In any case, white people, who had robbed black people of their liberty and who profited by this theft every hour that they lived, had no moral ground on which to stand. They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power. But it was a criminal power, to be feared but not respected, and to be outwitted in any way whatever.

I had discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power.

this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering—enough is certainly as good as a feast—but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are.

And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it.