Quotes About Authority

The theme of previous editions of The British Polity has

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

Uncle knows best.

Uncle knows best. -All the Lost Boys

If you strike me down, the paperwork will be more time-consuming that you can possibly imagine.

In a world without meaningful authority, all "acts" are coercive.

Whether or not a monarch or a mass leader has great executive ability or power, modern politics suggests that his primary function may well be psychological; he acts as a center around which otherwise disturbed lives can be organized.

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off the belief it inspires is what counts.

A Creed,3 or Rule of Faith,4 or Symbol,5 is a confession of faith for public use, or a form of words setting forth with authority certain articles of belief, which are regarded by the framers as necessary for salvation, or at least for the well-being of the Christian Church.

Leadership is not equivalent to office-holding or high prestige or authority or decision-making. It is not helpful to identify leadership with whatever is done by people in high places. The activity we have in mind may or may not be engaged in by those who are formally in positions of authority. This is inescapable if we are to develop a theory that will be useful in diagnosing cases of inadequate leadership on the part of persons in authority.

I think directors should be confident in their leadership capabilities. I think directors should be confident in what they want to do.

So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante's Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

Accurate forecasts may help do that sometimes, and when they do accuracy is welcome, but it is pushed aside if that's what the pursuit of power requires.

the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was.

But you don't know how to read anymore! When you open a book, you do it in the faith and assurances that you are already master of what it contains and that the author has written only so you may prove him wrong!

Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.

Fourteenth-century men seemed to have regarded their doctor in rather the same way as the twentieth-century men are apt to regard their priest, with tolerance for someone who was doing his best and the respect due to a man of learning but also with a nagging and uncomfortable conviction that he was largely irrelevant to the real and urgent problems of their lives.

Every evil starts with 15 volts.

All evil begins with fifteen volts.

The world hasn't changed that much; men still rule.

source material for wider reception. Indeed, when we consider how few masters of theology there were in the early Church, how small was their reading public, yet how great was their influence upon the course of history, we realize that a work can, by devious ways, profoundly affect people who have never laid eyes upon it. A single book, were it greatly to influence one man in a position of authority, could thus indirectly alter the course of a nation;

When people lost faith in their government, the result was revolution.

What matters is that you gain more and more control of the institutions that serve us all so poorly.

Women who have been repeatedly raped in childhood—often by authority figures in their own families—are traumatized human beings; as such, they are often diagnosed as borderline personalities.