Quotes About Authority

The habit of questioning authority is one of the most valuable gifts that a book, or a teacher, can give a young would-be scientist.

Sözcükler bizim hizmetkârlar?m?zd?r, efendilerimiz deÄŸil.

Indeed, adherents of scriptural authority show distressingly little curiosity about the (normally highly dubious) historical origins of their holy books.

Do we really need policing — whether by God or by each other — in order to stop us from behaving in a selfish and criminal manner?

There is in every village a torch – the teacher: and an extinguisher – the clergyman. VICTOR HUGO

There is in every village a torch—the teacher: and an extinguisher—the clergyman.

The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do.

organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to 'come out', thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.

atheists and agnostics are not organized and therefore exert almost zero influence. Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority.

The priests of the different religious sects…dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.

Why are scientists so cravenly respectful towards the ambitions of theologians, over questions that theologians are certainly no more qualified to answer than scientists themselves?

There he coined the acronym NOMA for the phrase 'non-overlapping magisteria':

When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn't happen with holy books.

Atheists don't have to fear a great spy camera in the sky. They only – so the argument goes – have to fear real cameras and real policemen. Maybe you've heard the cynical witticism 'Conscience is knowing that someone is watching'.

wanted to believe the Darwinian idea. I chose to believe it not because I think there was enormous evidence for it, nor because it had the full authority to give interpretation to my origins, but I chose to believe it because it delivered me from trying to find meaning and freed me to my own erotic passions.

I simply would not accede to being forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue.

These days he relied on the increasingly fragile assumption that what he said was right, and what was right was what he said.

He...discovered that people's goodwill was frequently in inverse relationship to their position...

How can power and ignorance sleep together?

No one's permitted in except contractors, owners, and local officialdom (plus President Obama and our big candied yam of a governor).

Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing. Someone else was paying.

The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?

From a legal point of view—" He shook his head. "Forget the law. It isn't going to help. They'll cite it where it suits them, ignore it where it doesn't. They're clerics, Archeth. They spend their whole fucking lives selectively interpreting textual authority to advantage.

YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT—WHY DON'T YOU TRY IT FOR A WHILE?