Quotes About Authority

Religion, by 'consecrating' the state, gives the people an added impetus to respect and regard their regime.

Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand holding out graces, favours, and immunities.

Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion.

The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.

The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.

No government could stand a moment, if it could be blown down with anything so loose and indefinite as an opinion of misconduct.

The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.

The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are both to be reckoned among their rights.

Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep,—to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy,—to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison.

There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.

timid piety, which utterly disqualifies for government;

lie together in one short sentence: namely, that we have acquired a right 1. To choose our own governors. 2. To cashier them for misconduct. 3. To frame a government for ourselves. This new, and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights

People crushed by laws, have no hope but to evade power. If the laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to the law; and those who have most to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.

Diplomacy, Roosevelt insisted, is utterly useless when there is no force behind it; the diplomat is the servant, not the master of the soldier.

An autocrat's a ruler that does what th' people wants an' takes th' blame f'r it.

Persuasion should come before force. In any case it is the availability of raw power, not the use of it, that makes for effective diplomacy.

confidently, "President

a stocky figure in a frock coat sprang up the front steps of the White House.

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere.

This isn't a banana republic. You can't pull strings in America, pay off an official, lean on your cousin. It's not like France or Spain – those banana republics.

Everything we wrote was submitted to the editors above us, grizzled Korean War pilots with buzz cuts and an encyclopedic knowledge, who would routinely bounce our copy back and demand "fixes" ("More color," "Doesn't track," or simply "Huh?" written in the margin).

Yet New York is always the chef, never the diner. Being

Two or three people had gone to Limerick and bought 'The Country Girls.' The parish priest asked them to hand in the books, which they did, and he burnt them on the grounds of the church.

I was constantly amazed by how many people talked me into arresting them.