Quotes About Authority

The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened.

Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.

Trump demanded subservience, but when he got it he was suspicious of the person providing it.

Confused to find that the power of the presidency had limitations, he came to see the limitations as his own

better understand the rules: they worked for Donald Trump, not for the president of the United States.

He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts,

he acceded to anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn't care about,

We serve at the president's displeasure," another.

Much of the left—which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community's unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower—now suddenly embraced the intelligence community's authority in its suggestion of Trump's nefarious relationships with the Russians.

just when you felt on top of the world in the Trump administration, you could probably count on getting cut down. That was the pattern and price of one-man leadership—insecure-man leadership.

The President didn't seem to realize that in order to make sound decisions there needed to be at least one adult in the room.

just worry about who's jerking whose chain.

Like the entire Saudi leadership, MBS had, practically speaking, no education.

Sooner or later, Trump felt contempt for anyone who showed him too much devotion.

For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to—"professor" was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.

Still, power provides its own excuses for social lapses.

Liberty did not on any account mean license.

They can stop their government any time they wish, simply through brute force or civil disobedience. No tyrant ever rules without the consent of the ruled. They are guilty by their inaction. "And

The Good Lord doesn't allow taxation of His workers and you must respect that.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

I am further of opinion that it would be better for us to have [no laws] at all than to have them in so prodigious numbers as we have.

It takes so much to be a king that he exists only as such. That extraneous glare that surrounds him hides him and conceals him from us; our sight breaks and is dissipated by it, being filled and arrested by this strong light.

On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.