Quotes About Authority

In times of crisis, credibility is an American president's most valuable currency.

The intelligent ruler does not value people who are of themselves good without rewards and punishments. Why is that? The laws of the state cannot be neglected, and it is not one man who is being ruled.

I don't mind UFO's and ghost stories, it's just that I tend to give value to the storyteller rather than to the story itself.

I don't value authority. I don't value the systems. I don't value patriarchal religion. I don't value the things that diminish you when you do tell the truth. So I'm not scared of the end result, and that is the biggest asset I have.

When he spoke, he illuminated a truth I had always yearned for and yet always run from. I am known as an authority on the holy texts, and yet when he spoke, I realized I knew nothing. And what I did know, I had cloaked in my own selfish interpretations. In so doing, I had turned the truth into lies.

The other men came in and somehow Lou got the same order across to them. We all went to comply—like so many dumb sheep.

It is vital for these new believers to understand that this is not a cult following any man. We seek the risen Lord. Our allegiance is to him alone. All power derives from Jesus and resides in him.

The conversion of all truths into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.

You always did like to run things, never mind your crafty knack for making everyone believe that somebody else was in charge.

populists have no problem with representation as long as they are the representatives; similarly, they are fine with elites as long as they are the elites leading the people.

populists are not generally "against institutions," and they are not destined to self-destruct once in power. They only oppose those institutions that, in their view, fail to produce the morally (as opposed to empirically) correct political outcomes. And that happens only when they are in opposition. Populists in power are fine with institutions—which is to say, their institutions.

No one asked Jamey to be the policeman and pastor of egos. Why does he think this is his obligation?

the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

The kings and priests of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots.

Commoners had to prostrate themselves before high-ranking chiefs. All the members of chiefly lineages, bureaucrats, and some craft specialists were freed from the work of food production.

Part of the solution to that problem was for one person, the chief, to exercise a monopoly on the right to use force.

it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it. While nomads and tribespeople occasionally defeat organized governments and religions, the trend over the past 13,000 years has been for the nomads and tribespeople to lose.

As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings.

leaders sometimes make a difference. But it depends on the type of leader, and on the type of effect examined.

William made his own children sign a checkout slip if they wanted to carry a book

Defiance through compliance.

He was, after all, the ultimate rebel -- it takes a lot of cojones to stand up to Zeus.

As it says on the Tshirts:'I don't scare easily - I'm a librarian.', which was the polite version of the original:'Don't give me any of your shit - I'm a librarian.

If you even *need* a government, added Stig, you are a life-form flawed beyond redemption.