Quotes About Authority

The military authorities say uniforms must be preserved at all costs, but that means manhandling patients who are in agony. Cut them off, says Sister Byrd, and she's the voice of authority here, in the Salle d'Attente, not some gold-braid-encrusted crustacean miles away from blood and pain, so cut they do, snip, snip, snip, snip, as close to the skin as they dare.

S/M flies in the face of every attempt the state makes to appropriate our bodies, our labor, our time, and our imaginations.…the state is deeply offended by any group of people who say, 'My body doesn't belong to you, it belongs to me, so fuck off'…

Men are prisoners of their genitalia and women are the keepers of the keys to paradise.

Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

Her view of men was one-dimensional, but not inaccurate: men were prisoners of their genitalia and women were the keepers of the keys to paradise.

No man or woman has the right to humiliate children, even in the sacrosanct name of education. No one has the right to beat children with leather straps, even under the sacred auspices of all school boards in the world.

I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost.

Sergeant Hicks seemed to be laid out in squares as though he were constructed out of cinder blocks. There was a hardness to his body that made his uniform appear to be little more than a paint job. He walked as if each step he took was driving a hated enemy toward a precipice.

a family is too disciplined an army to offer compassion to its deserters.

beware the law behind closed doors, the yellow-toothed men behind silver badges who had been betrayed by their chromosomes and their birth. She would talk of power as a yeast that could activate a malevolence that no force on earth could overcome once it had begun. Beware

I loathe it when they [English teachers] are bullied by no-nothing parents or cowardly school boards.

There's an old saying that anyone can make colonel on his own, but it takes a wife to make a general.

if you speak of this I will tear out your voice and top it down the nearest drain

Any individual who truly has a lot of social status has enough power that he or she doesn't need to use force.

Patricia Brennan Demuth

What was it about a woman—a certain kind of woman—standing at the mercy of men—righteous, civic-minded men, with the moral force of public outrage on their side—that could sometimes be secretly, shamefacedly titillating?

He resorted to tyranny—the favored fallback of English aristocrats when democracy wasn't going their way.

Given the same circumstances, I could break you down and make you kill someone. It might take different methods from the ones Bruno used on me, but it could be done. What else do you think keeps the totalitarian states going?

He would rather the man be a pervert than a police officer

Wouldn't you rather be asked a question than be given an order?

Some authorities declare that people may actually go insane in order to find, in the dreamland of insanity, the feeling of importance that has been denied them in the harsh world of reality.

far easier to give a talk that skims over the surface than to dig down for facts. But when you take the easy way you make little or no impression on the audience. After you have narrowed your subject, then the next step is to ask yourself questions that will deepen your understanding and prepare you to talk with authority on the topic you have chosen:

To manipulate, drive or manage people is not the same thing as to lead them.

Today there is no foundation. Ultimately what rules in a discipline today is the social pressure of the best professional opinion, and that changes.