Quotes About Authority

The greatness of a man's power is the measure of his surrender.

Do whatever you can to restore people's sense of having some control over their situation.

Notwithstanding our boastful assertions to the world, for nearly a century, that our government was based on the consent of the people, it rests upon force, as much as any government that ever existed. - Robert E. Lee

Secondly, If the command of Christ to teach all nations be confined to the apostles, then all such ordinary ministers who have endeavoured to carry the gospel to the heathens, have acted without a warrant, and run before they were sent.

Human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

As to the power which money gives, it is that of brute force, it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet, and of the bribed press, tongue and pen.

He who can deliberately inflict torture upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, is an abuser of the authority which God has given him, and is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart.

I am monarch of all I survey,My right there is none to dispute.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed that "an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." Emerson

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like. Edward, First Baron Thurlow

On 19 October 1774, the three Crown councillors appointed by the statutes of the Regulating Act, Philip Francis, General Clavering and Colonel Monson, finally docked in Calcutta. They were immediately offended to be given a seventeen-, not a twenty-one-gun salute, and by the 'mean and dishonourable' reception: 'there were no guards, no person to receive us or to show the way, no state.

as Edmund Burke famously put it, 'a state in the guise of a merchant'.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

What honour is left to us?' asked a Mughal official, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

The EIC was, as one of its directors admitted, 'an empire within an empire', with the power to make war or peace anywhere in the East.

Freedom to do as we're told under the law!

I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Manhattan phone book than the entire faculty of Harvard.

I would sooner be governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand members of the faculty of Harvard.

Democracy can itself be as tyrannical as a dictatorship, since it is the extent, not the source, of government power that impinges on freedom.

Pouring out liquor is like burning books.

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.