Quotes About Authority

I]n scientific matters it is always experience, and never authority without experience, that gives the final verdict, whether in favour or against.

Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened

She remembered her late husband's precepts about the police. What they did not know, generally speaking, they did not need to know. Ignorance in the Police Force, he had always maintained, was a natural state, and who are we, he would ask with a disarming shrug of his shoulders, to interfere with nature?

If there is such a person on the planet, then he or she—this self-appointed arbiter of "appropriateness"—deserves to be confronted with as many "inappropriate" transgressions as possible.

for the designated successor to royal authority, the Sovereign People, was no more capable than Louis XVI of reconciling freedom with power.

To prolong itself, the Protectorate needed Cromwell to be more of a Leviathan, more of a ruthless sovereign, than he could ever manage to stomach. This is both his exoneration and his failure.

The only people who are in a position to point out my errors are also those who are not at liberty to reveal them.

Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw.

The relation of woman to husband, of of daughter to father, of sister to brother, is a relation of vassalage.

It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high position: but—beware—the presence of a woman chief or a queen at the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state of abjection.

And she antagonized me by preferring the force of authority to friendliness.

That is why Saint-Just, who believed in the individual and who knew that all authority is violence, said with somber lucidity, "No one governs innocently.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it.

L'obéissance à un homme dont l'autorité n'est pas illuminée de légitimité, c'est un cauchemar

Fashion exerts more power in science than it does on the shape of hats.

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

The hysteria can't last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his readers. It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not believe that this comic tyranny could endure. It can't happen here, said even Doremus—even now.

government of the profits, by the profits, for the profits.

But it was indecent, it was sacrilegious to annoy an emperor, and in his irritation he had an ex-Senator and twelve workmen who were in concentration camps taken out and shot on the charge that they had told irreverent stories about him.

Main Street is the climax of civilization. That this Ford car might stand in front of the Bon Ton Store, Hannibal invaded Rome and Erasmus wrote in Oxford cloisters. What Ole Jenson the grocer says to Ezra Stowbody the banker is the new law for London, Prague, and the unprofitable isles of the sea; whatsoever Ezra does not know and sanction, that thing is heresy, worthless for knowing and wicked to consider.

Now you boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power is its own excuse!

to whom we should be grateful for explaining to us what the ruling classes of the country really want.

Thus she triumphed through the class, which was a typical Blodgett contest between a dreary teacher and unwilling children of twenty, won by the teacher because his opponents had to answer his questions, while their treacherous queries he could counter by demanding, Have you looked that up in the library? Well then, suppose you do!