Quotes About Authority

Local authorities keep an eye on proceedings. The Saigon Protestant Church in Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, one of the biggest in the country, has to submit a list of its event schedules, financial records and appointments of Church leaders to government officials for their prior approval.

You know who has tenure? The pope has tenure. The Queen of England has tenure. So does Fidel and the communists - because they represent the people, of course (scoff). Federal judges have tenure as well - no federal judge has ever successfully been removed. And then there's the college professors. Me. How do you like that?

As distinct from civil disobedience, Intelligent Disobedience works within a system rather than challenging the system itself.

once all voices have been heard and a decision is made by those with the authority to make it, if no core values are being violated, supporting that decision is the correct mode.

on the famous Lord Acton line: "Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.

Mussolini, like all other dictators, is betrayed by his own men.

you have to hate anyone who can dismiss you, even if they're good to you, because you work for them and not with them.

For behind all imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

An intellectual may be defined as a man who speaks with general authority about a subject on which he has no particular competence.

the world must not be run by men who are smiling, charming, incompetent reflections of the nincompoop masses. There are those of us who believe that the affairs of the world can be conducted peacefully and efficiently only by authorities who are not experts alone but who are also men of decisiveness.

Imagine the people who believe such things and who are not ashamed to ignore, totally, all the patient findings of thinking minds through all the centures since the Bible was written. And it is these ignorant people, the most uneducated, the most unimaginative, the most unthinking among us, who would make themselves the guides and leaders of us all; who would force their feeble and childish beliefs on us; who would invade our schools and libraries and homes. I personally resent it bitterly.

If we only obey those rules that we think are just and reasonable, then no rule will stand, for there is no rule that some will not think is unjust and unreasonable.

Courtiers don't take wagers against the king's skill. There is the deadly danger of winning.

The spell of power never quite releases its hold.

The art of quotation requires more delicacy in the practice than those conceive who can see nothing more in a quotation than an extract. Whenever the mind of a writer is saturated with the full inspiration of a great author, a quotation gives completeness to the whole; it seals his feelings with undisputed authority.

All this is labour which never meets the eye.... But too open and generous a revelation of the chapter and the page of the original quoted, has often proved detrimental to the legitimate honours of the quoter. They are unfairly appropriated by the next comer; the quoter is never quoted, but the authority he has afforded is produced by his successor with the air of an original research.

In Athens the first police force was recruited from among the slaves because it was considered beneath the dignity of the free man to deprive another free man of freedom. What a sound instinct! Here you have the almost naively striking expression of the dependence of the bureaucrat on the property owner: it is the slave who is the bureaucrat because bureaucracy is the slave of the possessing class.

What I fear most is power with impunity. I fear abuse of power, and the power to abuse.

The satisfaction earned by the striving can be whatever furnishes the strongest incentive to the child, for example, extra pleasures or possessions for a sensing child, special freedoms or opportunities for an intuitive, new dignity or authority for a thinker, and more praise or companionship for a feeling type.

Penelope was useful to him in this respect because she was - so she assured him - very much in the swim. Later he discovered seas more secret, cool and rarefied than those in which Penelope demonstrated her brave little breast stroke, but for the time being he submitted himself to her authority.

It breaks my heart to think of childhood, everybody bigger and whacking and shouting and teaching you not to reach for anything or look at anything, and not letting up on you till you get over wanting to.

I never let anyone pluck, including myself, unless my mom approves. She guards my eyebrows. She's like the eyebrow police!

For Rousseau), the ancient conflict (between liberty and authority) is to be resolved by breeding a race of men who will choose absolutely freely only that which is absolutely right.... there would be no conflict, no agony, no choice.