Quotes About Authority

Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority.

He shaped and molded that office to the contours of his own heroic stature.

The assumption spreads that government best knows what is good for its people, when ultimately it does not.

artificial security of the state and all its conventions and institutions

The fact that no material from brahminical Hindu scriptures or the Qur'an is included is easily explained. Either it could result in the charge that the Gurus were merely plagiarists or to the assertion that they did accept the authority of these scriptures. What they certainly were is eclectic in their view of scripture, refusing to claim that God spoke only through the revelation that was given to them.

The word sahib, which Sikhs use when they speak of the scripture, may become contentious in future. It was used respectfully in addressing, in particular, white men in the days of the Raj. The wife was known as the mem sahib, which indicated that her status derived from her husband. Sahib is used to acknowledge the status of the scripture in the same way, but some women writers may dispense with it, claiming that it reinforces the strong but unwarranted male dominance in the Sikh Panth.

Children should not offer their opinions in the presence of their elders or contradict them.

The value of money is that with it we can tell any man to go to the devil. It is the sixth sense which enables you to enjoy the other five.

Its quarrel is not with the past, but with the present, where its elders are so obviously powerful, and no cause seems lost if it seem to threaten that power.

King, whether you did right or wrong in this Let the King say, for all that I need say Is that there's nothing that cries out for death In the withholding of that ancient right

All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die.

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over. from an essay for Writers by Nancy Crampton

I was just about half-way through my sixth year, when one morning at breakfast we children were informed to our utter dismay that we could no longer be permitted to run absolutely wild

Shoeless Joe became a symbol of the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. The name Kenesaw Mountain Landis became synonymous with the Devil.

We stand a better chance with aristocracy, whether hereditary or elective, than with monarchy.

Forty years ago the chances of journalists reporting - or the authorities even prosecuting - a pro athlete were practically nil.

All a guy needed was a chance. Somebody was alway controlling who got a chance and who didn't.

A President has a great chance; his position is almost that of a king and a prime minister rolled into one.

At a time when the limits of leadership are being tested in so many places is your time to rule in your own territory.

Christmas is the gentlest, loveliest festival of the revolving year - and yet, for all that, when it speaks, its voice has strong authority.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

Anybody who thinks talk is cheap has never argued with a traffic cop.

Institutions have the pathetic megalomania of the computer whose whole vision of the world is its own program.