Quotes About Authority

If a man supervises but fails to nurture, it's possible that he's either a tyrant or an absentee landlord. Neither is fitting for a father, much less an elder.

I don't imagine Heads of Government would ever be able to say I'm not an economist therefore I can't take decisions on matters of the economy I'm not a soldier I can't take decisions on matters of defence I'm not an educationist so I can't take decisions about education.

Show your thoughts who's boss.

I swear by God, the Peerless, the Incomparable, the True One: for no other reason hath He the supreme Testimony of God invested Me with clear signs and tokens than that all men may be enabled to submit to His Cause.

They devoted the city to the lord and destroyed with the sword every living thing in it - men and women, young and old, cattle, sheep and donkeys.

Books educate people and educated people ask awkward questions of those who govern them. The educated, in short, are considered ungovernable. Better to keep people ignorant of the past and to concentrate their minds on the utopia that lies ahead.

Customs are more powerful than laws.

The sun sets without thy assistance.

He who commands the sea has command of everything.

[Of his son:] The boy is the most powerful of all the Hellenes; for the Hellenes are commanded by the Athenians, the Athenians by myself, myself by the boy's mother, and the mother by her boy.

I have with me two gods, Persuasion and Compulsion.

Thus, from the very outset, and in typically effusive fashion, did Marion Crawford set out the thesis that characterizes her celebrated, indeed notorious, book, The Little Princesses. By contrasting the sterling qualities of the future Queen with her younger sister's more capricious personality, Crawfie gave authority to what – by the time of the book's publication in 1950 – many people already believed.

Although princes need not necessarily be intelligent, it is essential that they have some sort of public presence. The Duke of York had none. Fine-boned and slightly built, he looked frail, seemed lacking in physical stamina. His air was tense, hesitant, ill-at-ease. An observer had only to notice the incessant working of his jaw muscles to appreciate that he was under severe strain.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's heads.

T]he sacred sense of right and the reverence for the law, which it is difficult to destroy in the minds of the multitude, it is still more difficult to reproduce.

Restoration is always revolution; but in this case it was not so much the old government as the old governor that was restored. The oligarchy made its appearance newly equipped in the armor of the tyrannis which had been overthrown.

For a man of the type of Pompeius, who for want of faith in himself and in his star timidly clung in public life to formal right, and with whom the pretext was nearly of as much importance as the motive, this circumstance was of serious weight.

He was one of those men who are capable it may be of a crime, but not of insubordination; in a good as in a bad sense, he was thoroughly a soldier. Men of mark respect the law as a moral necessity, ordinary men as a traditional everyday rule; for this very reason military discipline, in which more than anywhere else law takes the form of habit, fetters every man not entirely self-reliant as with a magic spell.

Euere Schuld, Deichgraf!" schrie eine Stimme aus dem Haufen.

The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.

Knowledge, which is power, knows no limits, either in its enslavement of creation or in its deference to worldly masters.

The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

Die fast unlösbare Aufgabe besteht darin, weder von der Macht der anderen, noch von der eigenen Ohnmacht sich dumm machen zu lassen.