Quotes About Authority

Governments will use whatever technology is available to combat their primary enemy - their own population.

Already the sahibs have done more to keep the lower castes in their places than our Hindu kings did over hundreds of years.

How do you fight an enemy who fights from neither enmity nor anger but in submission to orders from superiors, without protest and without conscience?

If you're in command, it's always your fault.

Even in that moment of distraction, Kanai noticed—so tenacious were the habits of his profession—that Fokir was using a different form of address with him now. From the respectful apni that he had been using before, he had switched to the same familiar tui Kanai had used in addressing him: it was as though in stepping onto the island, the authority of their positions had been reversed.

The government is to you what God is to agnostics – only to be invoked when your own well-being is at stake!

I thought of all the hours that i has spent at passport and visa counters, and the stark terror that an immigration officer's frown could still send through me.

only a woman has the power to choose whether or not to bestow.

lo que ocurre ahora es que todo el mundo en este país exclama El rey está desnudo y quizás por eso el niño deba encontrar un grito nuevo

Being conformist and respectful as I was of the grown-up world and its prevailing values, and having no brothers or sisters or friends to counterbalance the personality cult that surrounded me, I had no alternative but to concur, humbly but thoroughly, with the grown-ups' opinion of me.

It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on.

Women who are attacked phone a hotline for advice. Don't report a rape, the women are told. Call it indecent exposure. A guy who takes it out and doesn't do anything with it--cops figure that guys is sick.

Good leaders being scarce, following yourself is allowed.

Choices are powerful things. In fact, they're more powerful than most things.

A good government had to guide its people, sometimes gently, sometimes strictly, just as parents did. It could allow certain freedoms, but in a style that suited the country.

Being a dominatrix gave me the ultimate power: to sing without self-consciousness.

I am happy today. I am a tyrant.

Trying to please everyone all the time never works. It leads to hating oneself and then hating oneself even more when one later tries to assert one's authority.

For what use is it to forbid what we can't prevent? If books are forbidden, children read them on the sly.

Society knows perfectly well how to kill a man and has methods more subtle than death.

Social outrage is power protecting itself; it is not morality.

And mother, handmaiden to the Lord, says wear this, do that, don't do that, don't say that, sit, close your legs, wear white gloves and don't get them dirty, girls don't climb trees, girls don't run, girls don't, girls don't, girls don't; wasn't nothing girls actually did do of any interest whatsoever. It's when they get you a doll that pees that you recognize the dimensions of conspiracy, its institutional reach, its metaphysical ambition.

standard forms are sometimes called conventions, conventions are mightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrument of the Law, an unfeeling guard punching his fellow man hard in the belly.

No government should be given too much power, or the people comprising that government will use the power in the worst ways possible; individual freedom, when used within the boundaries of morality, is the highest good. The Constitution was written as a living testimony to this view.