Quotes About Authority

Martin Meredith

Power, it seems, is one of those terms we all understand and can explain--until asked to do so.

IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO YOU VOTE FOR, THE GOVERNMENT ALWAYS GETS IN. But

mayor, sounding

God had already told Adam and Eve what was right and what was wrong. But Satan said, in essence, "That's his opinion; you're entitled to your own opinion—you can make your own decisions about what is right and wrong.

Power isn't telling someone what to do, she told herself. Strength isn't having the upper hand. Nobility and grace are revealed in the manner in which love is given.

Miss Blanche Heyward, opera dancer, would have made a superlative drill sergeant if she had just been a man.

If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders.

The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish.

there is nothing more unaesthetic than a policeman

You seem very qualified, sir, to express the negative one. At the same time I would repeat in my own person the words of Thackeray. He said to some objector: 'What you say is natural, but if you had seen what I have seen you might alter your opinion'. Perhaps sometime you will be able to look into the matter, for your high position in the scientific world would give your opinion great weight.

leader in the Times

Isn't there one thing I can ask of you that you won't disregard?. . . . You could just reply, Yes, Baron, and be done with it.' Yes, Baron.

If you want to be successful, Sayuri, you must be sure that men's feelings remain always under your control.

They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled.

It is impossible to reign innocently. Saint-Just

It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.

Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere.

Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law, and an ocean of salt tears could not melt the resolution of the statutes.

When the law is wrong it's because it's unnatural, but in this case it is natural and a river will drown you if you buck it now

PARRIS: I want a mark of confidence, is all! I am your third preacher in seven years. I do not wish to be put out like the cat whenever some majority feels the whim.

The schoolmen peer with dulled eyes from amid the heap of precedents and prescriptions about them, and, distracted by seeing a thing sanctioned neither by precedent nor by prescription, dub the man realist, and rail against him for that his work fits none of their pigeon-holes.

Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.