Quotes About Authority

They governed from duty, heritage and habit—and, as they saw it, from right.

princes are instituted by God not to seek their own gain but the common good of the people.

Planted firmly across the path of change, operating warily, shrewdly yet with passionate conviction in defence of the existing order, was a peer who was Chancellor of Oxford University for life, had twice held the India Office, twice the Foreign Office and was now Prime Minister for the third time. He was Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury, ninth Earl and third Marquess of his line.

Meeting his commissariat staff for the first time as Commander in Chief, the Grand Duke said to them, "Gentlemen, no stealing.

against the unmeasured aggrandizement of any power whatsoever

the power to command frequently causes failure to think;

Fathers do as they wish with their children. They break their hearts if it suits them, as easily as they would wring a chicken's neck to make a meal!" -- Lewis Mallory

If I were a king, the mischief would be much greater; for I should ruin not only myself, but my subjects.

Destroy the idea of God, and you destroy the idea of moral authority.

Deny God, and authority rests on force alone; we relapse into despotism.

In vain is it argued that we are to give up our private judgment to a revelation; we can only admit the authority of the revelation by an act of our individual judgment.

In this is the great weakness of Protestantism. In their impatience of the authority of the Church, the reformers threw the proof of Christianity on a collection of documents bound together; they assumed it to be infallible, and its authors to be inspired—a claim not put forth by the authors themselves for writings which they never intended to serve as demonstrations of the faith.

Human authority may furnish conviction, but never certainty. Divine authority is immutable and infallible.

In the family, from the first, the idea of authority has appeared. Protection and order are requisites of the family; and these cannot exist without recognition of an authority.

Of authority there are two sorts, the authority of right, and the authority of force.

Thus man believes in truths of two kinds, in those of absolute certainty through direct conviction, and in those of comparative certainty through conviction of the trustworthiness of the authority which propounds them.

The liberty of the creature is at once alienable and inalienable; alienable because it depends on the will of the creature, and inalienable because it is absolutely willed by the Creator. It is alienable in fact, but inalienable by right. Natural right is the will of God, as it expresses itself in the essence of our reason, which is His workmanship. And as God alone is absolute, no pretended positive has any authority to contravene a natural right proceeding from Him.

Hitherto Christianity has leaned, or has been represented as leaning, on authority--on the authority of an infallible text, or of an inerrable Church. The inadequacy of either support has been repeatedly demonstrated, and as the props have been withdrawn, the faith of many has fallen with a crash.

Ballplayers do not argue with the umpire so that he'll change the decision in question. They want to be on his mind when he makes the next one.

In the infancy of societies, the chiefs of the state shape its institutions; later the institutions shape the chiefs of state.

I hate my boss! I hope he never graduates high school.

Foolish boy. Oh-ho, you know nothing of my powers, do you? See, I'm not just some royal pain in your butt anymore. I'm your mother-in-law. You think I've made your life difficult so far? Well now I'm family, and you've seen the way I treat my family.

What did I tell you about killing your brother in the living room?

Why did God create Adam before he created Eve? Because he didn't want anyone telling him how to make Adam.