Quotes About Authority

The only force left on Earth that can stand up to the largest corporations are national governments, some of which still maintain the power to tax, regulate, and divide corporations into smaller pieces when they get too powerful.

The Authority/subversion foundation

We are right to note the license and disobedience of this member which thrusts itself forward so inopportunely when we do not want it to, and which so inopportunely lets us down when we most need it. It imperiously contests for authority with our will.8

I showed that a Durkheimian society cannot be supported by the Care and Fairness foundations alone.18 You have to build on the Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity foundations as well.

The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

When you know what something is, you have power over it.

Justice is what the strong do the weak.

Your freedom it says. What is that? Some kind of illusory concept where the people in charge let you have comfortable distractions. Enough THINGS so that you don't see your chains. I respect your work too much to let you endure that kind of self-deception.

Overweening arrogance and why not? No one had told him no for a very long time.

heresy was often perceived by the Church as a financial or political threat rather than merely a theological one.

Interrogation...was the highest art of the inquisitor.

No offense against moral order was too trivial to escape the attention of the Spanish Inquisition.

Indeed, the greatest single innovation of the Spanish Inquisition was to turn heresy from a thought-crime into a blood-crime...

Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.

What the men in black did to their victims with such tools was not a crime.

countless thousands before him. The last of the inquisitors

Ti, kdo si trvají na jasných rozkazech nebo žádající legislativní opat?ení, nepochopili, že nezáleží na rozkazech, nýbrž na v?li nad?ízeného, a že p?íjemce rozkazu tuto v?li musí dešifrovat a dokonce p?edjímat.

If we were committing an injustice, we ought to think about it, and decide if it was necessary and inevitable, or if it was only the result of taking the easy way out, of laziness, of a lack of thought. It was a question of rigor. I knew that these decisions were made at a much higher level than our own; still, we weren't automatons, it was important not just to obey orders, but to adhere to them; yet I was having doubts, and that troubled me. Finally

after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn't become one by chance, and doesn't remain one by chance, either.

If people stop having secrets they stop having power.

Ludo, for Christ's sake stop saying okey-dokey. We're master criminals. We're supervillains. Can't you come up with something that doesn't sound like we're a couple of hicks?" "Yes, Your Exalted Evilness. How's that? Or should I call you Dark Lady?

I did not and do not want my life tied up in cloak-and-dagger bullshit, dead guys, or pissing contests with either the testosterone crowd in there or some prissy-assed Earl Grey-drinking, scone-munching major who isn't even my freaking boss. I don't know you and I don't give a rat's ass if you trust me.

It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. —Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV

If no laws applied to them, then no laws protected them either.