Quotes About Authority

The intellectual tradition is one of servility to power, and if I didn't betray it I'd be ashamed of myself.

I am opposed to the accumulation of executive power anywhere.

Education is a system of imposed ignorance.

For the powerful, crimes are those that others commit.

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

in a democracy the great leaders are allowed to lead only because they are elected.

Noli me tangere; for Caesar's I am.

by God he has the right sow by the ear.

I'd been at the mercy of a prick on a power trip, the kind of buttoned-up bantam rooster who gets off on control and then, when you resist him, tells you that you've got issues with control.

Last year, Congress gave the Department of Defense the authority to design a new civilian personnel system for its employees as part of the defense authorization bill.

authoritarian institutions, such as governments and churches, do not use language but jargon, repetitive phrases that are not supposed to have meaning but merely enforce obedience. Language has its own internalizing ethic; it is individualistic and thus threatening to any monolithic system that demands a chorus or litany.

D.A. I got my orders—either the recordings and the witness' name, or I put a slug in you where it'll do the most good.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

The law does not content itself with classifying and punishing crime. It invents crime.

The police have come to represent not just racist brutality but also the chief enforcers of a heartless, corrupt, unjust

When multi-national corporations are given the same powers as feudal states or nations: expect wars.

any specific teaching that contradicts a teaching of the Bible is false.

I think the greater responsibility, in terms of morality, is where leadership begins.

Nonspecialist science education has to pass along a general sense of the content, methods, efficacy, and authority of science. Yet it must do so without evoking the complex of resentments and anxieties that so ominously besiege science in contemporary society. At best this would be a daunting task. In the current climate, where our various social and political mechanisms are pulling in a dozen different directions at once, it may be an impossible one.

We were a single body,' Pisciotta said, 'bandits, police and Mafia, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

I insist on caprice as a necessary countermeasure to slavery. Otherwise, my own dictatorial mind must take -- unknown to me -- its instructions from a mastermind.

What is a good man if not one who does not believe in himself to the exclusion of others? ... He was asked to bear what cannot be borne--what should not be borne. I hope never to be so tested, for I have it on the best authority that I will not bear it.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.