Quotes About Authority

To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.

Everybody is equal. Everybody! That's the law. They are? Only from on top.

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it continues until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government – sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive – and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?

certain feet were made for stepping on ,in order to improve the breed, promote the general welfare and minimize the ancient insolence of office..

I hate to tell you this, but you are just stupid and eager and sincere enough to make the kind of officer that men love to follow into some silly predicament.

government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.

Government! Three fourths parasitic and the other fourth stupid fumbling—oh, he conceded that man, a social animal, could not avoid having government, any more than an individual man could escape his lifelong bondage to his bowels. But Harshaw did not have to like it. Simply because an evil was inescapable was no reason to term it a "good." He wished that government would wander off and get lost!

But you don't have to take his advice. Whether you use his ideas, or whether they spark some different plan—make your decision and snap out orders. The one thing—the only thing!—that can strike terror in the heart of a good platoon sergeant is to find that he's working for a boss who can't make up his mind.

You can die anyplace. They've never managed to regulate that.

All right, all right, have it your own way! I can't prove I'm right—so I must be wrong. Men!

the government'—that's too sweeping a term. 'The government' is several million people, nearly a million in Washington alone. We have to ask ourselves: Whose toes were being stepped on? What person or persons? Not 'the government'—but what individuals?

You're not privileged to call me 'Boss'; you're not tax deductible.

It is not nonsense and nobody asked you; you aren't competent to have an opinion about it.

She might say: "This mess will clear up if you take that troublemaker there — What's your name? You, with the goatee — out and shoot him. Do it now."--Glory Road; Heinlein

See here, son, if a deputy sheriff beats a prisoner to death, it's sweepstakes odds that the county commissioners didn't order it, didn't know it, and wouldn't have permitted it had they known. At worst they shut their eyes to it—afterwards—rather than upset their own applecarts. But assassination has never been an accepted policy in this country.

a government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.

Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal—else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy.

Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility—we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life—and lose it, if need be—to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert.

Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.

Nevertheless, her own political philosophy could have been stated baldly (which it never was) as a belief that men should rule the world and women should rule men.

It took you long enough to answer your phone." "It's my phone, Mr. Secretary. Sometimes I don't answer it at all.

The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits;

We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time—we've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

A public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show of public respect.