Quotes About Authority

Time's agency becomes most vicious when it is routinized for the practical effect of control. The routinizaton of time is a transformation cultivated by prison authorities and designed to make every day like every other. In this experience, paradoxically, time acts even to deaden one's sense of time. All the more true is this among the 80,000, likely more,[52] who are serving time in solitary confinement. Lisa

We cannot serve the executed God and the god of religious respectability.

The police are often the frontline for surveillance, control, and dissemination of terror in poor communities.

Yo! You're my dope dealer not my thesis adviser. If I wanted your opinion about my dissertation, I'd have asked for it, Motherfucker!

Any asshole with a Masters in Social Work can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can't mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blond.

When you abandon the Lord, it's only a matter of time before you start worshipping the Führer.

THOU ART NO THOR!

title doesn't make someone a leader—and the absence of a title shouldn't keep someone from leading.

Don't confuse opportunity with leadership. Others control many of our opportunities, so that shouldn't be our concern. We control our readiness.

You can lead, with or without, a title. If you wait until you get a title, you could wait forever.

Never forget: dupes believe, slaves fear, and rebels defy.

Our existence, and its attendant neurosis, is defined by a seemingly irresolvable contradiction: that we are outside of nature, beyond it and above it like minor deities, and yet always helplessly within it, forever defined and circumscribed by its blind and implacable authority.

And it makes you wonder—how can a people incapable of selecting their own lightbulbs and toilets possess enough competence to vote for their own rulers and fill out complicated tax returns?

What was to be a relatively innocuous federal government, operating from a defined enumeration of specific grants of power, has become an ever-present and unaccountable force. It is the nation's largest creditor, debtor, lender, employer, consumer, contractor, grantor, property owner, tenant, insurer, health-care provider, and pension guarantor. Moreover, with aggrandized police powers, what it does not control directly it bans or mandates by regulation.

But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

Locke, Montesquieu, many of the philosophers of the European Enlightenment, and the Founders, among others, knew that the history of organized government is mostly a history of a relative few and perfidious men co-opting, coercing, and eventually repressing the many through the centralization and consolidation of authority.

The whole point of American journalism has always been detachment from authority so that critical analysis is possible.

The federal government makes, executes, and adjudicates the laws. It even determines the extent to which it will comply with the Constitution, which was established in the first place to prevent governmental arrogation.

Obama has repeatedly defied the limits of his constitutional authority, aggregating powers unto himself in ways past presidents have not. During more than six years as president, Obama has nullified laws, created laws, delayed the implementation of laws, and issued exemptions from and waivers to laws, much of which has been accomplished through executive branch rule making.

Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps . . . and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life

Locke is not only underscoring his earlier point about man's right to resist the illegitimate, arbitrary power of government, particularly relating to his property rights; he is going further—that is, no government, including one established by the consent of the governed, has authority to violate man's inalienable rights.

Natural law is superior to, and precedes, political and governmental institutions.

Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity.

The masterminds and their flatterers are progressively immune to regular democratic processes and pressures, such as elections and citizen lobbying, unless, of course, the electoral results and policy demands comport with their own governing objectives. Otherwise, they have an escalating preference for rule by administrative regulation, executive decree, and judicial fiat as the ends justifies the means.