Quotes About Authority

Si Dios no existe, todo es lícito. Si todo es lícito, sólo admitiré como norma para mí mis criterios de conveniencia. Si todo es lícito, nada es malo. Y si algo es malo, te fastidias.

If you don't do it my way, I suggest you commit suicide.

Public discourse, the moment it becomes basically neutralized with regard to a strict standard of truth, stands by its nature ready to serve as an instrument in the hands of any ruler to pursue all kinds of power schemes.

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it. Awe is what moves us forward.

A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

What do you need the mythology? … Rituals evoke it. Consider the position of judges in our society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death.

Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem.

And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that's the sense of the Grail.

Absolute power corrupts, and power corrupts absolutely

It is a good thing for a physician to have prematurely grey hair and itching piles. The first makes him appear to know more than he does, and the second gives him an expression of concern which the patient interprets as being on his behalf.

An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense. Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.

The laws of God, the laws of man,He may keep that will and can;Not I: let God and man decreeLaws for themselves and not for me.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.

I stand corrected. Yours is a far superior arbitrary system of governance.

When a person feels powerless in regard to controlling his life, he can defend against the discomfort of such an experience by asserting control over someone else.

Communism is what happens when Socialists realize that they want complete control over every aspect of human life.

Madame la Guillotine is the younger sister, the ideological sibling of the 2nd Amendment; both were conceived of a need to purge overbearing governments.

Regulated rights are not rights. They are niceties and platitudes intended to keep the populace thinking their individual autonomy is respected by their government.

Socialism is submission of the masochistic masses to the will of the sadistic elites.

A nation's not a child, for God's sake. ... It's like a wild horse you tame by breaking it. Or a fiery woman you slap till she sees sense and warms your bed.