Quotes About Authority

Master Timekeeper: Not everyone thinks so. Most people enjoy order. Harlequin: I don't, and most of the people I know don't. Master Timekeeper: That's not true. How do you think we caught you? Harlequin: I'm not interested. Master Timekeeper: A girl named pretty Alice told us who you were. Harlequin: That's a lie. Master Timekeeper: It's true. You unnerve her. She wants to belong, she wants to conform, I'm going to turn you off.

The Western Canon does not exist in order to augment preexisting societal elites. It is there to be read by you and by strangers, so that you and those you will never meet can encounter authentic aesthetic power and the authority of what Baudelaire (and Erich Auerbach after him) called "aesthetic dignity." One

Spiritual power and spiritual authority notoriously shade over into both politics and poetry.

The defense of the great works of Western literature can no longer be undertaken by central institutional power though it is hard to see how the normal operation of learned institutions, including recruitment can manage without them.

thou shalt be a terror, and never shalt be any more.

I told Sergeant Major Plumley that he had unrestricted access to me at any time, on any subject he wished to raise.

When in charge, take charge, but treat your subordinates with respect, dignity, and common courtesy.

Good leaders don't wait for official permission to try out a new idea. In any organization, if you go looking for permission, you will inevitably find the one person who thinks his job is to say "No!" It's easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Never take a subordinate to the woodshed in front of others; do that in private.

Any journalist who holds the office writes in a straitjacket.

His secretary heard Lincoln authoritatively remind a caller on November 15 that "this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity." Here was Jacksonian firmness to spare. "That, however, is not the ugly point of this matter," Lincoln added grimly. "The ugly point is the necessity of keeping the government by force, as ours ought to be a government of fraternity.

Scout, I´m telling you for the last time, shut your trap or go home - I declare to the Lord you´re gettin´ more like a girl every day!" With that, I had no option but to join them.

I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

But at supper that evening after I asked him to pass the damn ham, please, Uncle Jack pointed at me. 'See me afterwards young lady,' he said.

Dill if you don't hush I'll knock you bowlegged.

You are too young to understand it," she said, "but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.

If she was on the porch when we passed, we would be raked by her wrathful gaze, subjected to ruthless interrogation regarding our behaviour, and given a melancholy prediction on what we would amount to when we grew up, which was always nothing.

sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father." I

The law is what he lives by. He'll do his best to prevent someone from beating up somebody else, then he'll turn around and try to stop no less than the Federal Government—just like you, child. You turned and tackled no less than your own tin god—but remember this, he'll always do it by the letter and by the spirit of the law. That's the way he lives.

get your stinkin' carcass off my property.

You are too young to understand it,' she said, 'but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is more dangerous than a whiskey bottle...

Dill and Jem emerged from a brief huddle: "If you stay you've got to do what we tell you," Dill warned. "We-ll," I said, "who's so high and mighty all of a sudden?" "If you don't say you'll do what we tell you, we ain't gonna tell you anything," Dill continued.

Possession holds good against all comers except the true owner.

it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: