Quotes About Authority

The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, including their victims, to become complicit in their crimes.

We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

La curiosità è insubordinazione allo stato puro.

Long-haired preachers come out every night And they tell you what's wrong and what's right And when you ask them for something to eat They tell you in voices so sweet: You will eat by and by, in that glorious place in the sky Work and pray, live on hay, you will get pie in sky when you die. That's a lie!

She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.

What choice does the king have but to kick the poets and storytellers out of his republic? And what choice does the poet have but to destabilize the philosopher king's power by speaking the truth?

Experience had proven that the only way these regulations would be heeded was if they were implemented by force.

demonstrators were attacked by the government-backed vigilantes.

I'm the President, but he's The Boss.

We have no authoritative figure, no Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow whom we all listen to and trust to sort out contradictory claims. Instead, the media is splintered into a thousand fragments, each with its own version of reality, each claiming the loyalty of a splintered nation.

I like being president because i get a cool house

What I was quickly discovering about the presidency was that no problem that landed on my desk, foreign or domestic, had a clean, 100 percent solution. If it had, someone else down the chain of command would have solved it already.

McConnell raised his hand like a traffic cop and said, "You must be under the mistaken impression that I care.

centuries of state-sponsored violence by whites against Black and brown people, and that who controlled legally sanctioned violence, how it was wielded and against whom, still mattered in the recesses of our tribal minds much more than we cared to admit.

The power to shape budgets and guide policy was what we needed, and that power lay elsewhere.

It's like moving-in day on a college campus, except a large percentage of the people involved are middle-aged, in suits, and, along with you, charged with running the most powerful nation on earth.

I grew comfortable enough [in the Oval Office] to put my feet up or sit on the desk ...

the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

whenever I write a letter to a family who has lost a loved one in Iraq, or read an email from a constituent who has dropped out of college because her student aid has been cut, I'm reminded that the actions of those in power have enormous consequences—a price that they themselves almost never have to pay.

The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. For what man, if not my own father, has the power to tell me otherwise? Whatever I do, it seems, I won't do much worse than he did.

A wealthy, famous, five-foot-six, 140-pound, fifty-eight-year-old white Harvard professor who walked with a cane because of a childhood leg injury would not have been handcuffed and taken down to the station merely for being rude to a cop who'd forced him to produce some form of identification while standing on his own damn property.

It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.

People think it's all a game," she said. "They don't care that there are thousands of men with guns out there who believe every word that's being said.

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.