AUTHORITY QUOTES II
quotations about authority
When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Enjoy Your Symptom!
Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.
JACQUES MARITAIN
"The Democratic Charter", Man and the State
To question authority productively, to question authority wisely, we need to realize that to question something really means to seek an answer, and that ultimately authority is never really separate from us, it is us.
STEVE NOWICKI
convocation speech delivered to Duke University Class of 2019, August 19, 2015
Mankind are apt to be strongly prejudiced in favor of whatever is countenanced by antiquity, enforced by authority, and recommended by custom. The pleasure of acquiescing in the decision of others is by most men so much preferred to the toil and hazard of inquiry, and so few are either able or disposed to examine for themselves, that the voice of law will generally be taken for the dictates of justice.
ROBERT HALL
Works of Robert Hall with a Memoir of His Life
Obedience to authority is deeply ingrained in us since birth. It starts with your mom and dad and expands to the rest of polite society -- your teacher, your soccer coach, the security guard who caught you and your friends trespassing when you were trying to imitate Steve-O.... Yeah, we've all been there, and you probably learned that going against authority has some sort of uncomfortable consequence.
ADAM HONIG
"Use The Authority Principle To Boost Sales", Spiro, October 6, 2015
When each citizen submits himself to the authority of law he does not thereby decrease his independence or freedom, but rather increases it. By recognizing that he is a part of a larger body which is banded together for a common purpose, he becomes more than an individual, he rises to a new dignity of citizenship. Instead of finding himself restricted and confined by rendering obedience to public law, he finds himself protected and defended and in the exercise of increased and increasing rights.
CALVIN COOLIDGE
speech, May 30, 1924
An institution's authority is only as good as the collective personal authority of the individuals who create and support that institution.
STEVE NOWICKI
convocation speech delivered to Duke University Class of 2019, August 19, 2015
Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right.
L. FRANK BAUM
The Master Key
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Language and Politics
Showing a lack of self-control is in the same vein granting authority to others: "Perhaps I need someone else to control me."
CRISS JAMI
Venus in Arms
Don't be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you've been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I haven't seen it myself. I couldn't prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority -- because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them: in fact, on authority. A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.
C. S. LEWIS
The Case for Christianity
Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.
VLADIMIR LENIN
attributed, Not By Politics Alone
Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him.
STANLEY MILGRAM
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
When conquest is achieved, the authority of the conqueror put an end to internal strife, and the social life-conception was justified. But this justification is only temporary. Internal feuds cease only when the pressure of authority is brought to bear with greater weight upon individuals formerly inimical to one another. The violence of the internal struggle, not annihilated by authority, is the offspring of authority itself. Authority is in the hands of men who, like all the rest, are ever ready to sacrifice the common weal if their own personal interests are at stake; with the sole difference that these men, encountering no resistance from the oppressed, are wholly subject to the corrupting influence of authority itself.
LEO TOLSTOY
The Kingdom of God is Within You
In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the bootmaker.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
God and the State
Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to observe and believe; or, if he does, he will hardly hope or venture to introduce opinions wherein he knows none or few of his mind, and thinks all others will defend those already received.
SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE
"An Essay on the Original and Nature of Government"
Nothing more impairs authority than a too frequent or indiscreet use of it. If thunder itself was to be continual, it would excite no more terror than the noise of a mill; and we should sleep in tranquility when it roared the loudest.
SIR JOHN BERNARD
A Present for an Apprentice
Despite the extreme ease of communication afforded by modern technology, all in real authority seem to wall themselves off from any contact with customer, client or taxpayer behind impenetrable screens of anonymity or unavailability. The classic recourse is the telephone that never answers, the recorded tape loop that repeats endlessly but masks a phone that is never picked up because no one is there.
FREDERICK FORSYTH
"Dangerous rift is opening up in Britain and it's deeply troubling", Express, November 7, 2015
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.
RUDOLF FLESCH
attributed, The Book of Unusual Quotations
Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.
ALAN MOORE
V for Vendetta