Quotes About Authority

If I can just get him in Kotoamatsukami, I can make Lord Fugaku tell everyone the coup is off. And I can make Fugaku himself believe from the bottom of his heart that it was his own idea.

What distinguishes a totalitarian ideology is its utterly insular quality. It purports to explain the entire world and everything in it.

Half of the population is behind bars and the other half is guarding them,' Russians have said of their country since the times of Stalin.

Putin wanted to rule the world, or a part of it, from the shadows.

Our souls are permanently empty. We have grown to presume everyone guilty at all times, thus creating hundreds of thousands of guards watching over our morality, conscience, purity of world view, compliance with the wishes of the authorities. We have turned truth into a crime. We have robbed nature to within a

Science gradually yielded to propaganda, and as a result propaganda tended more and more to represent itself as science.

There were no facts in her universe, and no issue of trust. There was power. Power demanded respect. Power conferred the right to speak and not be challenged. Being right was a question of power, not evidence.

had been just over a year since Khodorkovsky's arrest, and it was now clear Russia had passed two milestones. With the country's former richest man behind bars indefinitely, no one, not even the rich and powerful, could afford free agency.

Putin planned to dress him down, Putin said, "I understand that an illness is an illness, but I would recommend that Igor Vladimirovich [Zyuzin] get better as soon as possible. Or I'll just have to send a doctor to see him and take care of the problem altogether." In

activists who engaged in unsanctioned demonstrations (by this time, most opposition demonstrations were unsanctioned) should expect "to be hit over the head with a stick.

The plan, ostensibly, was for Medvedev to sit out his four years doing nothing but talking pretty, and then to cede the throne to Putin, this time for two consecutive six-year terms.

Russian law in fact gives the prime minister no authority over the military.

he seemed to see himself as a king barricaded in his castle, with thousands of soldiers in the battlement, the sights of their rifles trained on potential intruders.

Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.

So if gangsters become governments, does this mean that governments began as gangsters?

The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.

Every class is unfit to govern.' The problem is not the abuse of power, echoed the motivational speaker Michael Cloud more recently, but the power to abuse. The

If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?

God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.

For most of history, the state has been an 'ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights'

And even modern governments have an element of the crime syndicate about them. Police forces repeatedly harbour criminals all over the world: the US Department of Homeland Security is only a little more than a decade old, but in 2011 over three hundred of its employees were arrested for crimes such as drug smuggling, child pornography and selling intelligence to drug cartels. Like

Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.

As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.

the whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.