Quotes About Authority

In all practically relevant cases, governments—or more accurately the individuals involved in governmental process—do possess the power to coerce.

Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.

Omnipotence and omniscience are the end of power and knowledge.

Pretense cannot sustain blind power.

Statesmen are grocers, ambitious clowns.

Vandals listen only when others are stronger. If vandals are equal or stronger, their word is the last word.

I'm a talker, but that doesn't necessarily make a leader.

You don't want the decisions about your children's lives to be in my hands or any other judge's hands. We don't know your kids, we don't understand your kids. You're five minutes on my docket. We're going to make the best decision we can, but we don't love them."–Judge Lynn Toler, from the Divorce Court TV show2

Probably all laws are useless, for good men do not want laws at all, and bad men are made no better by them.

The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successor may be, no matter how wicked or stupid.

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Power acquired by violence is only a usurpation, and lasts only as long as the force of him who commands prevails over that of those who obey.

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Its always been my tendency to lie to doctors, as if good health consisted only of the ability to fool them.

that these people were supposed to know what they were doing, so I went along with their treatment. I didn't know what else to do. It was a very renowned hospital.

To take command, one must first create the illusion that command is already yours.

Me, die?" Nicola said with a breath of scorn. "You should know by now that it's not luck that keeps me alive, but my ill temper. Both God and the Devil are afraid of me.

Turning in his saddle, Theobald looked at the servants behind them. "We ride on through. If any man reaches for you, kill him." Then without so much as a by-your-leave, he leaned over and snatched Johanna's reins from her grasp, and spurred his horse into motion. As her palfrey complacently followed where he led, Johanna turned her gaze downward to glare at the saddletree and indulged herself in hatred—for him, for his master, but mostly for this

Kings can choose other than to sin. They can choose death instead.

Beau was going to have a cow. But when did Beau's opinion ever keep Zac from doing what he wanted?

He's all wrong for you," Travis said. "You're the expert? Last I checked, you resigned from that position.

A dictator decrees," she later wrote, "a president asks Congress for permission to organize.

The brand-new president felt, as he later wrote, "like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

Dennis: Oh, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.