Quotes About Authority

My will can control anything that's empty.

The Glory was entrusted to you, you weren't given permission to pass it on as you see fit.

Da soll mich doch gleich ein gekochter Hummer kitzeln, grollte der Kapitän

When it comes to controlling humans, there is no better instrument than lies.

Und wer die Zeit der Menschen besitzt, der hat unbegrenzte Macht!

Men of power have not time to read, yet men who do not read are not fit for power.

Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power

There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.

They like to get away with stuff, and they want a small group of players to know it too. Shooting drug dealers and taking their cash, inventing evidence, lying to make a case. They like the wink, they like thinking they're inside something and everyone else is on the outside looking in. Hell, you're the psychologist, you explain it. But it has

The mere fact that a group of people in the past agreed to a constitution is not enough to make that constitution just.

The rule of law bakes no bread, it is unable to distribute loaves or fishes (it has none), and it cannot protect itself against external assault, but it remains the most civilized and least burdensome conception of a state yet to be devised.

Charlie and Jamie had always sort of assumed that there was some grown-up in charge of the financial system whom they had never met; now, they saw there was not.

So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative. The

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time.

Making profits on Wall Street is a bit like eating the stuffing from a turkey. Some higher authority must first put the stuffing into the turkey. The turkey was stuffed more generously in the 1980s than ever before.

Steal from those beneath you; attack those above you.

Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

To Redelmeier the very idea that there was a great deal of uncertainty in medicine went largely unacknowledged by its authorities. There was a reason for this: To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error. The entire profession had arranged itself as if to confirm the wisdom of its decisions.

What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they'd ever seen this little man," says McCarthy. "And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That's when everyone panicked.

Jamie Mai was tall and strikingly handsome and so, almost by definition, had the air of a man in charge—until he opened his mouth and betrayed his lack of confidence in everything from tomorrow's sunrise to the future of the human race.

She dropped the matter, and his birthday remained May 28. Armed with the Social Security card, the birth certificate, and the letter from Principal Simpson of the Briarcrest Christian School, they drove the next day to the Department of Motor Vehicles. This time they had Collins in tow. Collins

the right word," Simpson said later. "He seemed completely intimidated by authority.

To fire a competent civil servant is a pain in the ass. To fire a competent presidential appointee is as easy as tweeting.

Cheese pizzas are the FDA's problem; pepperoni pizzas are supervised by the USDA.