Quotes About Authority

2.) A severe penalty: The Lord will not hold him guiltless; magistrates, who punish other offences, may not think themselves concerned to take notice of this, because it does not immediately offer injury either to private property or the public peace; but God, who is jealous for his honour, will not thus connive at it.

Power means never having to say you're sorry.

Parenting is mostly bribery . . . and yelling.

The captain of a ship can run a great ship, but he can't do anything about the tides.

Come not between the dragon and his wrath. —William Shakespeare King Lear

When the President asks you to do something, you'd be surprised how keen you are to oblige," Syme said.

Couldn't everyone see that the point of merit is to hold power accountable, not to supply yet another excuse for unaccountable power?

Te quiero, Donna —al ver que ella no contestaba, controló el estremecimiento de pánico y siguió hablando con su mejor voz de mando—. Y será mejor que tú también me quieras. Es una orden.

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.

And if we get caught, I will claim I made you go. At gunpoint. I am American. People will assume I'm armed.

Pedepsele nu sunt împ?rÈ›ite muritorilor de o guvernan?? ar??goas? sau de un dasc?l despotic; nu, pedeapsa e rezultatul logic, consecin?? inevitabil? a faptei rele.

To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking - and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence.

A man who would agree to betray his own conscience for the sake of a mitre, might well also steal and betray.

There's the gratitude of sons-in-law for you. You poison a king so that they may take his place, and then they do exactly as they please without consideration for anyone!

Peoples bear the weight of curses longer than the princes who incur them.

Power, without the consent of those over whom it is exercised, is a fraud that cannot long endure, a delicate balance between fear and rebellion, which may suddenly be overset when enough men become aware that they all think alike.

Silence your dog, captain!

The contingency of the future, which accounts for the violent acts of those in power, by the same token deprives these acts of all legitimacy, or equally legitimates the violence of their opponents. The right of the opposition is exactly equal to the right of those in power.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists. Nearly all of them admit that a State and a power are necessary. They do not wash their hands of it, and yet they do not consent to the myth. Or, when they do, they nonetheless give warning that it is a myth. This is the source of their uneasiness. It is not an anomaly or an aristocratic malady.

Power is of the order of the tacit.

Law not served by power is an illusion; but power not ruled by law is a menace.

She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn't mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.

To people at the top, the scariest thing is how many people there are below.

Since the days of Bluebeard the Best way of getting a man to do a thing is to tell him not to do it