Quotes About Authority

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.

A state is better governed which has few laws, and those laws strictly observed.

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.

The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

No man can be judged a criminal until he is found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection until it has been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorize the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt?

Our votes must go together with our guns. After all, any vote we shall have, shall have been the product of the gun. The gun which produces the vote should remain its security officer - its guarantor. The people's votes and the people's guns are always inseparable twins.

There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.

The Bible is the rock on which this Republic rests.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.

He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

While we are under the tyranny of Priests, it will ever be their interest, to invalidate the law of nature and reason, in order to establish systems incompatible therewith.

The police must obey the law while enforcing the law.

While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.

A holding company is a thing where you hand an accomplice the goods while the policeman searches you.

I would sincerely regret, and which never shall happen whilst I am in office, a military guard around the President.

Criticism does demand a certain kind of authority, but what about the authority of not really being sure what you think? What about the authority, the authenticity that comes from bringing all your intellectual, emotional and spiritual equipment to a piece of art or entertainment whilst still being uncertain and confused?

I've got to tell you what, the soldier doesn't fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him, okay, on his own whim. That's not what military leadership is all about.

By Congress delegating its authority to the executive and judicial branches, we've removed the American people from the process. They're left as bystanders to the whims of executive overreach, and they're watching the country they know and love slip away. Worse, they think their representatives are powerless to stop it.

Washington, as we know it, is essentially run by men and women who are not elected or even appointed to their posts, staff members unaccountable to traditional constituencies. They rise according to the needs and whims of their own special constituency of elites.

It is impossible to devise a scientific experiment to describe the creation process, or even to ascertain whether such a process can take place. The Creator does not create at the whim of a scientist.

It is a very bad idea for governments to create arbitrary and unfair outcomes, or outcomes resulting from the passions and whims of the government rather than from the law, just because they have the power to do so.