Quotes About Authority

People don't start wars, governments do.

We have the means to change the laws we find unjust or onerous. We cannot, as citizens, pick and choose the laws we will or will not obey. (On dismissing 12,000 striking air traffic controllers)

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

I have left orders to be awakened at any time during national emergency, even if I'm in a cabinet meeting.

I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There's a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.

A democracy cannot rule an empire. Neither can one man, though empire may appear to presuppose monarchy. There is always an oligarchy somewhere, open or concealed.

The composition of the oligarchy of government [...] emerges as the dominant theme of political history [...] ; it is something real and tangible, whatever may be the name or theory of the constitution.

In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade; and Roman history, Republican or Imperial, is the history of the governing class.

Ein wohlgeordneter Staat braucht keine großen Männer und hat keinen Raum für sie.

Few men have gained power, or retained it, by using, in Lenin's words, "the methods of a finishing school for young ladies.

Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party - though they are quite numerous - is no freedom at all.

The ultra-centralism asked by Lenin is full of the sterile spirit of the overseer. It is not a positive and creative spirit. Lenin's concern is not so much to make the activity of the party more fruitful as to control the party--to narrow the movement rather than to develop it, to bind rather than to unify it. . . . What is today only a phantom haunting Lenin's imagination may become reality tomorrow.

What presents itself to us as bourgeois legality is nothing but the violence of the ruling class, a violence raised to an obligatory norm from the outset.

Power is the ability to get things done.

In all this flurry of false scientism, the central question went unaddressed: if the possession of a penis and outsize brain were the distinguishing marks of the lords of creation, why was the world not rules by whales?

Achieving power, man reached out for the secret of control; and as he began to look beyond the end of his penis, he found a stronger lord, a greater master - God.

I urge every parent to become a Loving Hard-Ass Parent.

Time and time again, they all say the same thing. The worst punishment is losing your respect and disappointing you and taking away their ability to communicate with their peers.

É preciso ter a coragem e a autoridade de um Tolstói para nadar contra a corrente, desafiar as proibições e o clima geral da opinião pública e fazer o que manda sua consciência do dever".

These official men with their satisfied soft faces. He hated their approval just as much as he hated their condescension. And yet this truth was buried so deep inside him that its expression only emerged, in their presence, as a friendly smile.

That old buffalo woman gave Nanapush her views. She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him.

Any power she owned lay in her feigned indifference.

We try to press against the boundaries of what we are allowed, walk a step past the edge. Our records will be scrutinized by Congress one day and decisions on whether to enlarge our jurisdiction will be made.

He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease.