Quotes About Authority

It also meant that decisions were increasingly made in offices, behind closed doors, by foreigners with no connection to those whose fates they were deciding. The public display of the rulers' authority was replaced by the private circulation of incomprehensible paper.

The creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the horrors of Partition that eventually accompanied the collapse of British authority in 1947.

The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them…

In August 1765, the young and weakened Mughal emperor, Shah Alam II, was browbeaten into issuing a diwani that replaced his own revenue officials in the provinces of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa with the Company's. An international corporation with its own private army and princes paying deference to it had now officially become a revenue-collecting enterprise. India would never be the same again.

historian William Dalrymple quotes a Mughal official named Narayan Singh as asking after 1765, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.

She'd never imagined that her vagina had the power to destabilize a whole country.

Two commanders on the same field are always one too many

Grant agreed at least with the final sentence - which he later paraphrased and sharpened into a maxim: 'Two commanders on the same field are always one too many.' (p. 188)

a continuing tension between power and authority: power was dependent upon organizing cooperation, enlisting the generality of human and material resources in society, while authority claimed to derive from sources said to be rare or special—from Holy Scripture, from God

The end of worship amongst men, is power. —Thomas Hobbes

The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of a Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the "mute button.

a conception of an expansive power that goes beyond previous understandings, and justifies it, not by an appeal to legal authority or political principle, but by a Manichaean myth that depicts two formations locked in a death struggle. One is the representative of absolute justice, the other of absolute injustice.

Thus, early on, while the people were declared "sovereign," they were precluded from governing.

Inverted totalitarianism, in contrast, while exploiting the authority and resources of the state, gains its dynamic by combining with other forms of power, such as evangelical religions, and most notably by encouraging a symbiotic relationship between traditional government and the system of "private" governance represented by the modern business corporation.

In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.

Lying is more than deception; the liar wants the unreal to be accepted as actuality, so he sets about to establish as true what is not actually the case, not really real. A lie by a public authority is meant to be accepted by the public as an "official" truth concerning the "real world." At bottom, lying is the expression of a will to power. My power is increased if you accept "a picture of the world which is a product of my will.

the effective exercise of managerial skills dictates certain institutional requirements, among them strong and centralized authority, a hierarchical power structure, top-down control, and an aversion to whistle-blowers.

he "rules" with a kind of Gaullist grandeur, testing the constitutional limits of office, while pursuing a politics of "daring, sacrifice," and "nobility."30 Above all, ideally the executive stands not for programs but for "virtue." That means, among other things, he is prepared to act in defiance of the popular will.

an intrusive government of the politically self-righteous

You admit nothing. Deny everything. Demand proof. Did you learn nothing in Boot Camp? (Mace to Smitty)

More militerry, less skools.

If the law does not do justice, the people will mock the law.

The only difference between a futile madman and an effective tyrant is power and will.