Quotes About Authority

Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.

It would surprise no impartial observer if the motto, In God we trust, were one day expunged from the coins of the republic by the Junkers at Washington, and the far more appropriate word, Verboten, substituted. Nor would it astound any save the most romantic if, at the same time, the goddess of liberty were taken off the silver dollars to make room for a bas relief of a policeman in a spiked helmet.

Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.

Befragt die Geringeren, auf daß nicht die Größeren Euch antworten und mehr heraufbeschwören, als Ihr vermöget

Gen. Scott saw more through the eyes of his staff officers than through his own.

On olemassa kasvoja, joilla on valtaa ihmisen ylitse siihen saakka, kun hän jonakin kauniina päivänä loppuu.

In our offices and places of work we love to tell others what to do.We denigrate them.We compare their work unfavourably with our own.We are always in competition.We show off and gossip.Our dream is of being well treated and we dream of treating others badly...

Transgression affirms the very rules it intends to flout. Nothing supports the norm like deviation.

Ali isto tako sam i shvatio da prestupnistvo samo ucvrscuje pravila koja pokusava da prekrsi. Nista ne osnazuje normu kao odstupanje od nje.

Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.

Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.

Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility: he can never admit an error.....The propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecy....Mass leaders in power have one concern wich overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.

Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.' - On Civil Disobedience in 1969

Today we ought to add to these terms the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many can be held responsible and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody.

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.

In regard to the law of the state—that is, the accumulated power of society as monopolized by the state—there is no question of right or wrong, but only absolute obedience, the blind conformism of bourgeois society.

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.

To be sure, totalitarian dictators do not consciously embark upon the road to insanity. The

That the authority of the nation-state itself depended largely on the economic independence and political neutrality of its civil servants becomes obvious in our time; the decline of nations has invariably started with the corruption of its permanent administration and the general conviction that civil servants are in the pay, not of the state, but of the owning classes.