Quotes About Authority

Nikolai Bukharin [1888–1938], a Communist author who lived in a Communist country, wrote a pamphlet in 19175, in which he said, we asked for freedom of the press, thought, and civil liberties in the past because we were in the opposition and needed these liberties to conquer. Now that we have conquered, there is no longer any need for such civil liberties.

Liberty is meaningless if it is only the liberty to agree with those in power.

The alternative to the rule of law is the rule of despots.

The socialistic State owns all material factors of production and thus directs it.

arguments from authority are invalid; the proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship;

With all production, employment, and distribution of output completely under the monopoly control of the State, the fate and fortune of every individual would be at the mercy of the political authority.

He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.

Nobody ever recommended a dictatorship aiming at ends other than those he himself approved. He who advocates dictatorship always advocates the unrestricted rule of his own will

The market system is the basis of our civilization. Its only alternative is the Führer principle.

What good is the legal process if people can decide their motives are bigger than the law?

Where is the line? We're taught to stand up for ourselves; we're taught to stand up for others we care about. But all of a sudden, there's a new line drawn by the law. You sit back, it says, and let us deal with this.

Never ask your child a open-ended question, such as Do you want to go to bed now? You won't want to hear the answer, believe me. Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed? That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.

This judge has a chip on her shoulder the size of the whole goddamned courthouse.

My scholar, my serious, sweet boy, is now a rebel—holed up in his room listening to music so loud it makes the walls shake or texting friends I did not know he had; coming home past curfew smelling of hard liquor and weed. I have fought, I have cried, and now, I am not sure what else to do. The whole train of our lives is in the process of derailing; this is only one of the cars skidding off the tracks.

then unleashed Stargate's 18 sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom and law...

Back in the twentieth century, they had established to everybody's satisfaction that 'I was just following orders' was an inadequate excuse for inhuman contact … but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the 'the buck stops here' type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

I think everyone in a two mile radius heard. She doesn't get pissed that often, but when she does, not even God is going to defy her.

Originally planning to go with a small house concept, we found it was illegal to build a house of less than nine hundred square feet. Why? By what authority can anybody tell me what kind of house I have to live in?

Historians tell us that Talleyrand once told Napoleon, "You can do anything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them." In the language of the court this meant that obedience to the law ultimately depended on cooperation, not force.

The people need a master only as long as they have no understanding of their own. The more it acquires understanding, the more the government is bound to change its methods and to disappear. The most noble end of government is to become dispensable, so that everyone must govern himself.

I was becoming acutely aware […] that Negroes rarely were allowed to be experts about themselves; others always knew more, wrote or said more, or at least what they said or wrote got around more and certainly was given more credence.

The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.

The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.