Quotes About Authority

The white boys bruised differently than the black boys and called it the Ice Cream Factory because you came out with bruises of every color. The black boys called it the White House because that was its official name and it fit and didn't need to be embellished. The White House delivered the law and everybody obeyed.

If you had the power to make people do what you wanted and never exercised it, what was the point of having it?

Patrol was not difficult work. They stopped any niggers they saw and demanded their passes. They stopped niggers they knew to be free, for their amusement but also to remind the Africans of the forces arrayed against them, whether they were owned by a white man or not.

Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order.

Women and animals, you only have to break them in once, he said. They stay broke. All

The patroller required no reason to stop a person apart from color.

They were the paper of record, which meant they were in the business of protecting the system

Cora had become too accustomed to escaping unscathed from encounters with white authority.

the shadow of the master, the reminder that

Carney spied a patrolman across the street, drinking a Coca-Cola through a straw with bovine serenity. For a moment, he entertained the ridiculous proposition of a Negro calling a cop to complain he was being threatened by two white men.

She wanted to tell him so much, on the tarmac, the day he left. The world is run by brutal men and the surest proof is their armies. If they ask you to stand still, you should dance. If they ask you to burn the flag, wave it. If they ask you to murder, re-create. Theorem, anti-theorem, corollary, anti-corollary. Underline it twice. It's all there in the numbers. Listen to your mother. Listen to me, Joshua. Look me in the eyes. I have something to tell you.

The true nature of a democracy is its ability to say yes when even the powerful say no

death by drowning, death by snakebite ... death by memory loss, death by claymore ... death by paper cuts, death by whoreknife, death by poker game ... death by authority, death by isolation, death by genocide, death by Kennedy ... death by signature, death by silence ... death by performance

In the war I was subject to military law, but subject to law nevertheless; now I am at the mercy of an arbitrary power.

My sister the booty police.

he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

instead of fighting the system, it was often better to say yes and then go off and do whatever you thought was best.

armor-plated presidential

They said it was all a plot to get rid of democracy and replace it with a dictatorship. That

Above all others, that was the lesson that had been beaten into her. Follow orders. You are nothing. A machine cog that either performs its function or is torn out and replaced.

Not only was Prefect Mutz waiting for them, but his boss, Director General Jacques Gisquet, and his boss's boss, Minister of the Interior Pierre Blot, were waiting for them. Neville saw this as a sign that they were taking her accusations seriously. Simon saw the potential for something very different, but before he could stop his boss, she started in.

I used to believe in God. And even the royalty. Now I see the first as delusional and the second as naïve. All that pomp and circumstance is just a weapon the strong use against the weak. And a strangely effective one.

Ohlmeyer saw communism for the sham that it was—a bunch of brutes who seized power in the name of the people, only to repress the very people they claimed to champion