Quotes About Authority

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

The dilemma of the critic has always been that if he knows enough to speak with authority, he knows too much to speak with detachment. ( A Qualified Farewell )

There are places where cops are not hated, Captain. But in those places you wouldn't be a cop.

The trouble with cops is not that they're dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something that they didn't have before. Maybe it did once, but not anymore. They're topped by too many smart minds.

It's like this with us baby. We're coppers and everybody hates our guts....nothing we do is right, not ever. If we get a confession we beat it out of a guy, they say, and some shyster lawyer calls us Gestapo.

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants.

His blue eyes frosted. 'Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir?' 'No. But I'm having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.

You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail.

You can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a close mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.

Go on," he said, in a voice the size of a marble.

thinking. Maybe it would be better if you called the police." "Call them yourself. I haven't anything to tell then." "You want me to?

in kings people overlook and forgive behaviour they would not tolerate in others.

Kroldech isn't fit to command fleas attacking a dog.

Your job, your home, your relationships, your very life - and your death - all, and more, are managed, controlled and directed by the law.

One more thing about Cassandra: in the most famous version of the myth, the disbelief with which her prophecies were met was the result of a curse placed on her by Apollo when she refused to have sex with the god. The idea that loss of credibility is tied to asserting rights over your own body was there all along. But with the real-life Cassandras among us, we can lift the curse by making up our own minds about who to believe and why.

To say that the emperor has no clothes is a nice anti-authoritarian gesture, but to say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inverted version of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.

One of the rights that the powerful often assume is the power to dictate reality.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't. Sometimes I think these pretenses at authoritative knowledge are failures of language: the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity

Smile, a man orders you, and that's a concise way to say that he owns you; he's the boss; you do as you're told; your face is there to serve his life, not express your own. He's someone; you're no one.

This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak. In my case, it wasn't a silencing because no speech was stopped; it never started, or it had been stopped so far back I don't remember how it happened. It never occurred to me to speak to the men who pressured me then, because it didn't occur to me that I had the authority to assert myself thus or that they had any obligation or inclination to respect my assertions, or that my words would do anything but make things worse.

rights are more reliable than the kindness of someone who has absolute power over you.

Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly one at the heart of the status quo, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so. Generations of women have been told they are delusional, confused, manipulative, malicious, conspiratorial, congenitally dishonest, often all at once.