Quotes About Authority

if autocrats always acted wisely they would not furnish history with moral lessons.

When a pope's election could not be explained rationally, it was attributed to the Holy Ghost.

Rule was still personal, deriving from the fief of land and oath of homage. Not citizen to state but vassal to lord was the bond that underlay political structure.

if people could be made to save money, the King could obtain it when necessary.

Within the army, field officers despised Staff officers as "having the brains of canaries and the manners of Potsdam," but both groups were as one in their distaste for interference by civilian ministers who were known as "the frocks." The civil arm in its turn referred to the military as "the boneheads.

Officers succumbed to the spirit of conspirators.

Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority.

He fought all proposals designed to increase the political power of the masses. When still

His solution, beautiful and unattainable, was philosopher-kings.

To understand the popes we must look at the princes.

It is necessary to salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.

Policy was not reconsidered because the governing group had no habit of purposeful consultation.

To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup. When

No Pope ever issued a Bull to approve of something.

I need no Chief," said the Kaiser; "I can do this for myself.

The hypothetical has its charm, but actual government is history.

The castle's predecessor, the Roman villa, had been unfortified, depending on Roman law and the Roman legions for its ramparts. After the Empire's collapse, the medieval society that emerged was a set of disjointed and clashing parts subject to no central or effective secular authority.

He believed that rank without power was a sham.

Complacency is an attribute of long-retained power like that of the Chinese.

executions were meant as an exercise in frightfulness according to the theory developed by the Emperor Caligula: "Oderint dum metuant" (Let them hate us as long as they fear us).

Major von Kleist gave orders that a man or, if no man was available, a woman, be taken from every household as a hostage." Through some peculiar failure of the system, the greater the terror, the more terror seemed to be necessary.

What the Ambassador was witnessing—in idea, if not yet in fact—was the transfer of power from its arbitrary exercise by nobles and monarchs to power stationed in a constitution and in representation of the people. The period of the transfer, coinciding with his own career, from 1767 to 1797,

Joffre was adept at taking advice, and submitted more or less consciously to the reigning doctrinaires of the Operations Bureau. They formed what a French military critic called "a church outside which there was no salvation and which could never pardon those who revealed the falsity of its doctrine.

Nevertheless Sir John French next day sent Joffre definitive notice that the British Army would not be in condition to take its place in the line "for another ten days." Had he asked for ten days' time out when fighting with his back to London he would not have survived in command. As it was, Sir John French remained Commander in Chief for another year and a half.