Quotes About Authority

They had in mind the usurpation of power by a single individual or group, or the circumvention of law by rulers for their own benefit.

Most governments, most of the time, seek to monopolize violence. If only the government can legitimately use force, and this use is constrained by law, then the forms of politics that we take for granted become possible.

One class of elementary school students, for example, sent a letter to party authorities asking "for your help, since we are falling down from hunger. We should be learning, but we are too hungry to walk."75

The Great Terror took place during a state of exception that required all policemen to subordinate themselves to the NKVD and its special tasks.

Professional ethics must guide us precisely when we are told that the situation is exceptional. Then there is no such thing as "just following orders".

The claim that order is freedom or that freedom is order ends in tyranny.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

Might did make right, not just in practice, but as a matter of principle; and, of course, this conclusion came very close to abolishing the very idea of principle.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. "I found so much obedience," Milgram remembered, "that I hardly saw the need for taking the experiment to Germany.

Milgram grasped that people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority. "I

To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.

When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.

You can certainly concede freedom without becoming more secure. The

It is the government's job to increase both freedom and security.

They handled hundreds of cases at a time, at a pace of sixty per hour or more; the life or death of an individual human was decided in a minute or less. In a single night the Leningrad troika, for example, sentenced to death 658 prisoners of the concentration camp at Solovki.55

The SS began as an organization outside the law, became an organization that transcended the law, and ended up as an organization that undid the law.

The most intelligent of the Nazis, the legal theorist Carl Schmitt, explained in clear language the essence of fascist governance. The way to destroy all rules, he explained, was to focus on the idea of the exception. A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency. Citizens then trade real freedom for fake safety.

people are remarkably receptive to new rules in a new setting. They are surprisingly willing to harm and kill others in the service of some new purpose if they are so instructed by a new authority.

The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions—even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will

Believe in truth: to abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticise power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

Chinese authorities demonstrated during the climate-related civil war that began in Sudan in 2003 that they would support mass murderers when doing so seemed to serve their investments. In

Law had no purpose beyond the codification of a Führer's momentary intuitions about the good of his race.

When the Holocaust is blamed on the modern state, the weakening of state authority appears salutary.

The greater and the more obvious the lie, the more his subjects demonstrate their loyalty by accepting it, and the more they participate in the great sacral mystery of Kremlin p