Quotes About Authority

Those who doubt that these moments matter should note how terrified the authorities and elites are when they erupt. That fear signifies their recognition that popular power is real enough to overturn regimes and rewrite the social contract. And it often has. Sometimes your enemies know what your friends can't believe. Those who dismiss these moments because of their imperfections, limitations, or incompleteness need to look harder at what joy and hope shine out of them

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 and speculation.

One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, "Why are you asking that?

As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: "His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients." If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.

Pero los hombres que explican cosas aún asumen que soy, en una obscena metáfora fecundadora, un recipiente vacío que debe ser rellenado con su sabiduría y conocimiento.

Like many very poor people and people from countries in turmoil, Nafissatou Diallo had lived in the margins, where telling the truth to authorities is not always a wise or safe thing to do, so she was portrayed as a liar.

Too, the elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.

To believe him, you'd have to buy the line that Diallo took one look at his potbellied, 60-something naked body fresh out of the shower and just volunteered to go down on her knees.

The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head.

We are still in an era of battles over who will be granted the right to speak and the right to be believed

He was already telling me about the very important book--with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

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

People would ask the question, 'How do we keep these very powerful men from being so abusive. And I was like, 'I don't think we're going to stop them from being so abusive, so let's stop them from being so powerful.

The function of the state and of its structures in such a society are limited only to that which cannot be performed by anyone else. [Quoting Valclad Havel]

Perhaps it's not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power.

I don't care what the fire department says about fire hazards. I have lived through fire before.

You should smile at that,' he said. 'There is a Yiddish word, schlemiel, a man who falls over everything, who buys brass for gold. There should be a goy word for the elegant schlemiel, who has been born to handle gold but never knows it from brass and calls it gold with the weight of authority, who falls over everything but does it with such assurance that the fall is taken for a curtsy.

This cancellation of process in government leaves it an empty violence that must perpetually and at any cost outdo itself, for it has no alternative idea and hence no alternative activity

What can I say? Librarians rule.

Heresy no longer existed within religion; it was founded in the state.

Je to sice náÅ¡ velitel, ale není to v?dce. Scott je egoista.

Shackleton sice na cestách do vnitrozemí ledového kontinentu neohrožoval Scottovu autoritu, ale jejich charaktery jsou pÃ…â"¢íliÅ¡ rozdílné.

kids have anger, emotional, drug, and authority problems because they come from broken homes or homes that have been filled with violence. They have come from homes without a father and with a mother who is often angry at all men because she was abandoned by her man.