Quotes About Authority

The Authority considers that conscious beings of every kind have become dangerously independent, so Metatron is going to intervene much more actively in human affairs.

I'd pray for this above all: that any church set up in your name should remain poor, and powerless, and modest. That it should wield no authority except that of love. That it should never cast anyone out. That it should own no property and make no laws. That it should not condemn, but only forgive.

The effect was as if each teacher was being examined by a fierce inspector, and each lesson became an ordeal in which not the pupils but the teachers were being tested.

He showed me things I had never seen, cruelties and horrors all committed in the name of the Authority, all designed to destroy the joys and the truthfulness of life.

Así procede la iglesia; todas hacen lo mismo: controlar, destruir y erradicar cualquier sensación placentera.

His massive, plain, blunt presence was enough to calm them.

Ik weet wat de Dienst Kinderbescherming is,' zei Alice. Malcolm had zijn mond vol eten, maar wist uit te brengen: 'Wat dan?' Haar dæmon zei: 'Klootzakken,' en gromde weer.

I am their father.

Oh, this was confusing. Mrs. Coulter was so kind and wise, whereas Lyra had actually seen the Master trying to poison Uncle Asriel. Which of them did she owe most obedience to?

command, Your Eminence. You have only to

whatever humanness he had left felt the strangest of pleasures: that of offering eager obedience to a stronger power that was wholly right.

But heaven knows there are enough policemen about. They're like a plague of cockroaches. You can't move without stepping on them.

obsequious submissiveness to the religious authorities, and ultimately to Geneva.

Iofur's playing a difficult game. But he's clever. He's done what they both want. He's kept Lord Asriel isolated, to please Mrs. Coulter; and he's let Lord Asriel have all the equipment he wants, to please him . Can't last, this equilibrium. Unstable. Pleasing both sides. Eh? The wave function of this situation is going to collapse quite soon. I have it on good authority.

a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases, and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn't as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.

They recruited the most supple and athletic of the cops to train as mounted policemen, and a small kid could be mesmerized just watching one who'd been lazing majestically down the street stop to write a parking ticket and then lean way over in the saddle so as to place the ticket under the car's windshield wiper, a physical gesture, if ever there was one, of magnificent condescension to the machine age.

For discipline is imposed not just on oneself but on those in one's orbit.

Why doesn't she call the cops and get me shipped off to children's prison, if this is how incorrigible I really am? "Alexander Portnoy, aged five, you are hereby sentenced to hang by your neck until you are dead for refusing to say you are sorry to your mother." You'd think the child lapping up their milk and taking baths with his duck and his boats in their tub was the most wanted criminal in America.

Think of it, half the race is over, and I still stand here at the starting line—me, the first one out of his swaddling clothes and into his track suit! a hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q., and still arguing with the authorities about the rules and regulations! disputing the course to be run! calling into question the legitimacy of the track commission!

Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All the we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Their reasons for asking us to be both law-abiding and superior were not reasons we could find the conscience to discount, and so control that was close to absolute was ceded to adults who were striving and improving themselves through us.

Bullies love to summarize.

The main benefit of controlling a modern bureaucratic state is not the power to persecute the innocent. It is the power to protect the guilty.

And then humbly consider this second troubling question: If the Trump administration were as convinced as you are that you would do the right thing—would they have asked you in the first place?