Quotes About Authority

One is always a good master when one isn't the master

Law was always made by the few and in general for the purpose of preserving the existing order, or for the reestablishment of the old order and the punishment of the offenders against it.

The highest places are always slippery: Men's eyes dazzle when they are carried up to them; and falls from them are mortal. Few kings or tyrants, says Juvenal, go down to the grave in peace...

No man can justly impose anything upon those who owe him nothing. . . . Whosoever therefore . . . grounds his pretensions of right upon usurpation and tyranny, declares himself to be, like Nimrod, a usurper and a tyrant, that is an enemy to God and man, and to have no right at all.

If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

A well-governed state is as fruitful to all good purposes, as the seven-headed serpent is said to have been in evil; when one head is cut off, many rise up in the place of it. Good order being once established, makes good men...

Humanae Vitae, or our own bishops

It was clear from the start that they were not like other children, therefore Susanna felt she had no choice but to set down rules. No walking in the moonlight, no Ouija boards, no candles, no red shoes, no wearing black, no going shoeless, no amulets, no night-blooming flowers, no reading novels about magic, no cats, no crows, and no venturing below Fourteenth Street. Yet no matter how Susanna tried to enforce these rules, the children continued to thwart her.

She had come to believe that if her father had wanted a docile daughter, he should never have allowed her access to the ocean.

The priests were deferential, siding with Rome, and those who opposed them were said to be robbers and thugs, my father and his friends among

Kill something, and it's yours forever.

It would be a different Church if I were running it." And so lifted the burden of that terrible morning with some laughter.

What is wrong with you?" their father was saying. "Why can't you behave?" Michael—it was not fear on his face, only a kind of disbelief, as if this tall, red-faced, shouting man had materialized out of the wind—looked up to say, "Just playing. I was just playing." But

Sister St. Saviour did, of course. But the woman, childless, stubborn, coming to the close of her life, had a mad heart. Mad for mercy, perhaps, mad for her own authority in all things—a trait Annie had come to love and admire—but mad nonetheless. Riding home from the cemetery, Sister St. Saviour had said, "It would be a different Church if I were running it.

Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant's life. Afterward they are repressed and are then, because of their very nature, inaccessible to argument. Nothing changes in the character of submission or dependency, when it is only their object that is changed.

Everyone who has been beaten as a child is susceptible to fear; everyone who was deprived of love as a child will long for it, sometimes their whole lives. This longing contains a whole bundle of expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the fear we have referred to, form an excellent medium in which the Fourth Commandment can thrive. It represents the power of adults over children, and it's reflected unmistakably in all the religions of the world.

If an adult has not developed and mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem to threatening to him.

people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built up around them.

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the book's authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

Captain Tervitt had been a real captain, for many years, on the lake boats. Now he had a job as a special constable. He stopped the cars to let the children cross the street in front of the school and kept them from sledding down the side street in winter. He blew his whistle and held up one big hand, which looked like a clown's hand, in a white glove. He was still tall and straight and broad-shouldered, though old and white-haired. Cars would do what he said, and the children, too.

verdad, joven, si usted no lo sabe, no debería tener un trabajo de tanta responsabilidad.

Soon she noted that teachers in subjects besides gym didn't report her if she cut. They were happy not to have her there: her intelligence made her a problem. It demanded attention and rushed their lesson plans forward.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.