Quotes About Authority

The feeling that one must be an authority in a subject to say anything about it is unfounded. We are all laymen outside the field of our own specialty,

That feeling of hopelessness only serves your masters.

Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

Between the collapse of the utopian ideology of God's kingship on the one hand and the refusal to deify the king on the other, a semiautonomous sphere of human politics was born. God is not the king, and the king will be accepted only so long as he renounces all claims to be a god.

At the heart of politics lies an existential urge for physical security, and the people proved willing and even eager to relinquish whatever unsupervised freedom and entitlements they enjoyed in the state of divine anarchy, and to surrender to a political sovereign who will freely tax and conscript them so long as he can also safeguard them from their pitiless enemies.

Whether attained by craft or by chance, great power has a way of defining the person who wields it. Finding themselves venerated by those around them, the supremely powerful almost inevitably begin to worship themselves.

Arabs respect only the language of force.

Don't forget to weigh that Posho and beans again when you receive it, you know we don't trust our government

I had him say: "I renounce any evil spirits of depression, and, in Jesus' name, I command them to leave." (Laity have authority over their own bodies and can command demons to leave them in Jesus' name).

Words, without power, is mere philosophy.

When a child is rebuked or disciplined by the mother, it feels no resentment towards her; while it resents being punished by the father.

If the government fails to listen to your demands, then you will decide what is best for you.

I don't want the chair of the government because it will be controlled by the U.S. and I don't want to be controlled by the U.S.

I guess you don't worry about leaving your speeder in a bad part of town when you're what makes the town bad

These men breathe hard but the committee has a voice of steel.

The man in the white coat is the man on the hill, the man with the clean hands is the man with the drill, the man who answers "yes" lies still.

Above all, the revolutionary group must divest itself of the forms of power—statutes, hierarchies, property, prescribed opinions, fetishes, paraphernalia, official etiquette—and of the subtlest as well as the most obvious of bureaucratic and bourgeois traits that consciously and unconsciously reinforce authority and hierarchy.

From the family, through the school and religious institutions, the mass media, to the factory and finally trade union and "revolutionary" party, capitalist society conspires to foster obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic, and authoritarian discipline in the working class as a whole; indeed, in many of its "emancipatory" movements as well.

It is evident that the State needs the intellectuals; it is not so evident why intellectuals need the State.

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

If "we are the government," then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also "voluntary" on the part of the individual concerned. If the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is "doing it to himself" and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred.

The last few centuries were times when men tried to place constitutional and other limits on the State, only to find that such limits, as with all other attempts, have failed. Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check. The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever.

Of all the numerous forms that governments have taken over the centuries, of all the concepts and institutions that have been tried, none has succeeded in keeping the State in check.