Quotes About Authority

The tension between the governed and the governing is what makes the world go 'round. It's not love, it's that tension, because that tension exists in love affairs. The whole idea of control is at the heart of human relationships. Control and resistance to control.

A functioning police state needs no police.

You see control can never be a means to any practical end. Control can never be a means to anything but more control like Junk.

The people are like water and the ruler a boat. Water can support a boat or overturn it.

We were not born to sue, but to command.

Unhand me, gentlemen,By heaven! I'll make a ghost of him that lets me.

That in the captain's but a choleric word,Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

Heaven is above all yet; there sits a judgeThat no king can corrupt.

So every bondman in his own hand bearsThe power to cancel his captivity.

Hear you this Triton of the minnows? mark youHis absolute "shall"?

Thou [Death] setter up and plucker down of kings.

Thieves for their robbery have authority When judges steal themselves.

The bloody book of lawYou shall yourself read in the bitter letterAfter your own sense.

A politician… one that would circumvent God.

For how can tyrants safely govern home,Unless abroad they purchase great alliance?

There's such divinity doth hedge a king,That treason can but peep to what it would.

I am Sir Oracle,And when I ope my lips let no dog bark!

Speak, hands, for me!

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks;Small have continual plodders ever won,Save base authority from others' books.These earthly godfathers of heaven's lightsThat give a name to every fixed star,Have no more profit of their shining nightsThan those that walk and wot not what they are.

Ay, every inch a king.

Every subject's duty is the king's; but every subject's soul is his own.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

The demi-Atlas of this earth, the armAnd burgonet of men.

And art made tongue-tied by authority.