Quotes About Authority

I am more afraid of my own heart than of the pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great pope, Self. MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546)

In her world, husbands were omnipotent, never impotent.

to tyrannize for the country is to tyrannize over the country

her thrones were not her concern.

No king or emperor in the world had the power to keep captive this nonentity

it occupies more and more space in society, and at last becomes its ruling force.

So much power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny. Was I a tyrant, wielding shapeless power without authority? What I felt a lot of the time was a sort of stage fright, the way I imagine inexperienced teachers must feel when they stand at the front of the class looking at a sea of expectant faces.

So much of power lies in the ability to see how willing other people are to give it to you.

Is it male attention I want, or male authority?

People are least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them.

Anyone who votes for McGowan is 100 percent right. He was a great umpire. He belongs in the Hall of Fame.

They all want to be me. They do! What everybody else says they will do, I've already been doing. They all want to be me. It's become a joke in Congress how Dr. Gingrey and Mr. Kingston have been following my votes. They've even changed votes to what I voted, multiple times. Members of Congress are laughing about it.

In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies.

Our MPs will take decisions on how they're voting on a day-to-day basis. But I'm the leader of the party, and in terms of our overall strategy and how we vote on key issues, then ultimately, those decisions will be mine.

For years, American officials visiting China marvelled at how Chinese leaders could push through infrastructure projects and sweeping legislative changes without the complications of opposition and the niceties of voting.

I only aim at the powerful. When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel - it's vulgar.

Even criticism is more interesting when the writer's authority does not only come through this omniscient narrator, but through questions, ambivalence, vulnerability. A mind questioning and on the move, not just settling down and declaring - that's one of the most interesting possibilities.

Like the child, the creative writing student is posited as a centre of vulnerable creativity, needful of attention and authority.

Comedy often comes at the expense of others, and to do that smartly, you don't want to make fun of vulnerable people. You want to make fun of people in power, and so you need to really understand the dynamics of power.

People on the lower rungs are more vulnerable to sexual harassment than those at the top.

A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.

President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either.

The federal government was created to defend the United States, not to wage war upon it.