Quotes About Authority

I'd really like to go with you, Agachak. Truly I would...but I just can't. I don't understand. Why not? I'm not allowed to leave home. My mother'd punish me something awful if I did... But you're the king. That doesn't change a thing. I still do what mother says. She tells everybody that I'm the best boy ever when it comes to that. Agachak resisted a powerful urge to change this half-wit into a toad or perhaps a jellyfish.

Who owns a man, Durnik?" the blond young man asked sadly. "The one who rules him, or the one who pays him?

The quality of student work has definitely gone downhill since they discontinued the use of the whipping post. -Silk

I want to set the record straight. The record's never straight, you idiot! Haven't you ever read 1984 ? They rewrite the record anytime it doesn't suit them. You're spinning your wheels and exposing your bare fanny for nothing.

The policeman recognized me, but I suppose that's only natural. Silk was going to kill him, but I said no." "Why?" Beldin asked bluntly. "We were in the middle of a busy street for one thing. Killing somebody's the sort of thing you ought to do in private, wouldn't you say?

It's common knowledge that the church is nothing more than an invention of the priesthood designed to swindle the ordinary people of the empire out of just about everything they own.

Priests are pretty much the same the world over. They seem to feel that their exclusive contact with God gives them a certain job security.

The queen sighed. What am I going to do with all of you now! You're going to let us continue our journey, Belgarath replied calmly. We'll argue about it, of course, but in the end that's the way it'll turn out. She stared at him. You did ask, after all. I'm sure you feel better now that you know.

It's the way of kings.

We can try to act civilized and polite, but at the bottom of it all, the power of any ruler is based on a threat. Fortunately, we don't have to carry that threat out too often.

Morality deals with what we might like to do, but politics deals with what we must do. There's no connection between them at all.

It's all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a belly-ache?' That's the major argument against any kind of absolutism.

Power is power, Garion. The results are the same. You don't have to hurt people if you don't want to.

To raise it all to artistry, Barak and Greldik ordered their men to lounge indolently on the decks of their ships, drinking ale and playing dice.

A wise king does not garner all wit, instead he also allows his cunselors to be wise.

Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est. (Roughly, They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.)

It's no accident that in a bureaucracy getting fired is called 'termination,' as in ontological erasure.

if you think the corporations are evil and it's the government's job to make them moral, you're deflecting your own responsibility to civics. You're making the government your big brother and the corporation the evil bully your big brother's supposed to keep off you at recess.

Don't ask why if you don't want to die. Do as you're told if you want to get old.

It's no coincidence it's the gurus on mountains who're wise. You get to the top: you're already theirs.

rabid distrust of what they consider authority without evidently once stopping to consider the rigid authoritarianism implicit in the rigid uniformity of their own quote unquote nonconformist uniform, vocabulary, attitudes

The father of Ruth van Cleve's child, she reports, is under the protection and care of the Norfolk County Correctional Authority, awaiting sentencing for what Ruth van Cleve describes several times as operating a pharmaceutical company without a license.

I said I think I'm being followed.' 'Some men are born to lead, O.

His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl's. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.