Quotes About Authority

The truth that is variously enacted by such agents is not an idea or a proposition. It is rather a habit of life that simply (!) refuses the totalizing claims of power. The governor, on behalf of the empire, will continue to ask, "What is truth?" And the apostles will continue to give answer, uncommonly unintimidated: "'We must obey God rather than any human authority'" (Acts 5:29).14

The royal dynasty of King David, as portrayed in the biblical text, was a tax-collecting, labor-exploiting, surplus-wealth-exhibiting regime.

power is not free to disregard truth.

The withdrawal of the king from the narrative exposes the king as an irrelevance. The one with all the power can do nothing to save. Because it is only "my God who saves.

With this phrase he is insisting that his power is not grounded in the usual authority of empire; it is not an authority that comes out of the end of a gun or a cannon in coercive or violent ways. His kingdom, his claim to authority, is indeed "divine" in that it is rooted in and derived from "the will of the father," whose intention for the world is quite unlike the intent of Rome.

The power of King Jesus is intrinsically revolutionary and subversive against every repressive regime.

The old limits of the possible have been exposed as fraudulent inventions designed to keep the powerless in their places. Jesus violates such invented limitations and opens the world to the impossible. He ends that defiant declaration with the admonition: "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me" (v. 23).

subversives in the face of totalism have always had to speak twice in the same utterance, once for the official record and once for the truth of bodily reality.

what interests us more is that a parable is the chosen mode of communication. Indeed, it must be.33 One cannot address royal power directly, especially royal power so deeply guilty and shamed. It is permissible to talk about speaking truth to power; but if truth is to have a chance with power, it must be done with some subtlety.34

The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.

The outcome is to delegitimize and deconstruct the kings in effective ways in order to show that while they occupy the forms of power, they lack the substance of power.

Our founders, in the words of Thomas Paine, recognized that, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

It's government people, not rich people, who have the power to coerce and make our lives miserable. Coercive power goes a long way toward explaining political corruption.

With that, the officer approached the cab with his hand on his pistol and opened the door, demanding that I get out and asking me who in the hell did I think I was talking to him that way. I attempted to get my passenger's name and address as a witness to the incident; but the officer warned him he'd better be on his way lest he be charged with interfering with a policeman.

When state and religion are one, religion becomes a means for the powerful to remain in power.

When she spoke, entire planets hushed to hear her words. People she had never heard of, and never -would- hear of, committed suicide at the thought that they were unworthy to share the universe with her. Obscure alien races knelt at her image and spit up, with appropriate ritual obeisance, offerings of the very best regurgitated fish-liver wine.

if a person of authority talks only to those who agree with him he soon finds himself out of authority. Luke

The public school system is] usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurancesand the economy of effort it brings.

The public must be put in its place, so that it may exercise its own powers, but no less and perhaps even more, so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange direction. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves.

Photographs have the kind of authority over imagination to-day, which the printed word had yesterday, and the spoken word before that. They seem utterly real. They come, we imagine, directly to us without human meddling, and they are the most effortless food for the mind conceivable. Any description in words, or even any inert picture exists in the mind. But on the screen the whole process of observing, describing, reporting, and then imagining, has been accomplished for you.

The established leaders of any organization have great natural advantages. They are believed to have better sources of information. The books and papers are in their offices. They took part in the important conferences. They met the important people. They have responsibility. It is, therefore, easier for them to secure attention and to speak in a convincing tone. But also they have a very great deal of control over the access to the facts. Every official is in some degree a censor.

The public must be put in its place [...] so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd.