Quotes About Authority

There's no point delegating a decision if you won't accept the outcome.

I'll argue to the death against stupid legislation, but some rules exist for a reason.

Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.

It requires a strong sense of responsibility to be a good functionary. In situations involving obedience to authority, people carry out orders partly to honor the obligations they have undertaken. One must, therefore, distinguish between two levels of responsibility—duty to one's superiors, and accountability for the effects of one's actions.

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State.

By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.

Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the power of the State.

To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.

A slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.

The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

Our defense is not in our armaments, nor in science, nor in going underground. Our defense is in law and order.

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this counrty is closely related with this.

Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you.

The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.

In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

State power has an unbroken record of inability to do anything efficiently, economically, disinterestedly or honestly; yet when the slightest dissatisfaction arises over any exercise of social power, the aid of the agent least qualified to give aid is immediately called for.