Quotes About Authority

The fact is, a bigger badge isn't going to help at all. People aren't going to follow you because you order them to.

I define a factory as an organization that has figured it out, a place where people go to do what they're told and earn a paycheck.

The factory is a dead end and so is compliance. More obedience will not make us better. That's why graceful is in such demand.

It's not an accident that school is like a job, not an accident that there are supervisors and rules and tests and quality control. You do well, you get another job (the next grade), and continue to do well and you get a real job. Do poorly, don't fit in, rebel—and you are kicked out of the system.

we give up our freedoms and responsibilities in exchange for the certainty that comes from being told what to do

People want to be told what to do because they are afraid (petrified) of figuring it out for themselves.

As a general rule, managers don't like deviants. By definition, deviance from established standards is a failure for a manager working to deliver on spec. So, most of the time, most managers work hard to stamp out deviance (and the deviants who create it).

Schools have figured this out. They need shortcuts in order to successfully process millions of students a year, and they've discovered that fear is a great shortcut on the way to teaching compliance.

Like scared civilians eager to do whatever a despot tells them, we give up our freedoms and responsibilities in exchange for the certainty that comes from being told what to do.

It's okay to have someone you work for, someone who watches over you, someone who pays you. But the moment you treat that person like a boss, like someone in charge of your movements and your output, you are a cog, not an artist.

The same way soldiers realize that it's war that makes generals

Some tribes are stuck. They embrace the status quo and drown out any tribe member who dares to question authority and the accepted order. Big charities, tiny clubs, struggling corporations—they're tribes and they're stuck. I'm not so interested in those tribes. They create little of value and they're sort of boring. Every one of those tribes, though, is a movement waiting to happen, a group of people just waiting to be energized and transformed.

It's Good to Be King In fact, in a stable world, it's great to be king. Lots of perks. Not a lot of hassles. Kings have always worked to maintain stability because that's the best way to stay king.

Skill and attitude are essential. Authority is not.

The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

This desire for external approval and authority directly undermines your ability to trust yourself, because you've handed this trust over to an institution instead. Now, more and more of us are seeing that it's a fraud. The institutions have no magical powers, as they're regularly proved wrong in their ability to select, to mold, and to amplify human beings who care enough to make change happen.

Mrs. Westcliffe, our headmistress, had a ramrod spine and ebony hair and lips that could pinch off her words with such knife-edged clarity you wondered that you didn't bleed to death from a mere, "Good morning.

Those who served both the Almighty and secular lords did their best to follow Jesus's teachings and render unto Caesar the things which were Caesar's, and unto God the things that were God's, all the while praying they'd never have to choose between the two.

Ned never argued with their father, he was unfailingly polite and then nonchalantly went his own way; whereas, he, Edmund, deferred dutifully to his father's authority and then found himself resenting both his parent's austere discipline and his own reluctance to rebel.

She wanted to order him clapped in irons, as he so deserved. But she was stopped by what she saw in the faces of the watching men: disapproval, instinctive and involuntary, but disapproval, nonetheless. They were not comfortable when power was wielded by a woman, not at a man's expense, a man who had just acquitted himself so spectacularly at Lincoln, winning their reluctant respect in a way she knew she never could.

If, like the Romans, he must make a desert and call it peace, so be it.

Will did not think that was fair, but he accepted that kings were often unfair and there was naught to be done about it.

Statecraft and kingship were not for the faint of heart

As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.