Quotes About Authority

When you say a word—negative or positive—you release powerful forces. Every word you say has power. There is no such thing as a powerless word. —Marianne Williamson I

Let others do your work for you. Use quotes, anecdotes, information from other authorities; let them carry your message across. —Vladimir Nabokov

Overlooked in this ominous depiction might be our country's best- kept secret: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every gener- ation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story.

Derrida's texts aren't located "outside" the texts they examine, in a position of attempted mastery or privileged authority. He doesn't simply reject or oppose them. It's more a strategy of inhabiting them, making a destabilizing passage through them, undoing their presuppositions and desedimenting them: stirring up their underlying levels.

But the rules are made by people who couldn't win without 'em.

Arabelle," Debs was saying. "Arabelle, please listen to me." Arabelle was not listening, and I didn't think my sister's vocal tone of combined anger and authority was well calculated to win over anyone—especially not someone who looked like she had been sent over from a casting office to play the part of a cleaning woman with no green card.

Special Agent Recht looked at me, then stared across the room to where Deborah was talking to the captain. "What a family," she said, and walked past me to rejoin her generic-looking partner. I thought of several very good comebacks that would have put her neatly in her place, but after all, her place was actually several rungs above mine on the food chain, so I just called out, "Have a nice day," to her back and headed out the door to my car.

You're too young to go to the mall," Rita said. "And anyway—" "I'm almost twelve," Astor interrupted with a hiss, making "twelve" sound like an age so advanced that it required regular geriatric care.

He had committed hanky-panky with paperwork, and if something in the System is committed to paper, it becomes transubstantiated into a Sacred Relic. To

I stood up, too. I felt like I should say something polite to the two feds, but nothing came to me that didn't make me sound like a puerile lick-spittle, so I just nodded and turned for the door.

I could have told her that I was quite convinced, and that she would be, too, if she talked to Samantha for five minutes. But when Deborah makes up her mind, it takes a written order from the police commissioner to change it, and I didn't think there was one in the works.

I do the math. On one side: Anderson, the entire police force, the media, and most likely the pope himself. On the other side, my innocence. This does not add up to a terribly encouraging bottom line.

I stared at the phone for a long moment before I replaced it in its cradle. I was not sure what had just happened, or what it meant: "Come up to my office right now"? Captains do not hand out special assignments to blood-spatter analysts, and we do not visit captains' offices socially, either. So what was this about? My

responsibility, had been shifted from the president's weakening shoulders. It was now up

Is that not what a commander must do, earn respect, give them discipline and . . . love them?

colonel, was outranked by both Puller and Litzenberg. But no one seemed concerned with the insignia

Imagine that the correct words had been chosen by those people who are in charge of our lives. A few well-though-out words and things might have been different. Unfortunately, they have chosen all the wrong words.

Parents know all about the verses related to how children should behave but not so much about those that remind them about how they should behave.

His rules were unencumbered by my constraints—the Constitution and the laws promulgated thereunder. Still

There will always be a Comrade Vo. There have always been governments that tell us what to do and what not to do, to tell us what to believe and how to behave. We are small people who must bend with the slightest breeze. That is the essence of small people. We can no more change these events than we can change the direction of the wind.

You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should've seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if metallurgy report wasn't in your hands ASAP there'd be one mean mother——you get the picture——reaming their——you get the rest of the picture.

Remember what Lyndon Johnson said about J. Edgar Hoover? I'd rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

How was it possible that he could handle Swiss bankers, West End impresarios, senior partners and seasoned solicitors, but was a quivering wreck in the presence of this man?

strange how women in positions of authority so often acquire the sobriquet bossy, while a man holding the same rank is somehow invested with qualities of leadership