Authority Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Everyone in a position of authority is hysterical, and everyone else is pretending to be asleep.

Samuel R. Delany

Not every defeat of authority is a gain for individual freedom, nor every judicial rescue of a convict a victory for liberty.

Robert H. Jackson

Atheism may be defined as the mental attitude which unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing a lifestyle and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary assumptions of authority and creeds.

Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects governments to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother. Feminism has inherited these contradictions.

The character structure of modern man, who reproduces a six-thousand-year-old patriarchal authoritarian culture is typified by characterological armoring against his inner nature and against the social misery which surrounds him. This characterolgical armoring of the character is the basis of isolation, indigence, craving for authority, fear of responsibility, mystic longing, sexual misery, and neurotically impotent rebelliousness.

Beware of the manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don't look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.

The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a corporative. It was called a Code Authority.

Saddam's defiance of United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding the disarmament of his nuclear, chemical, biological, and long-range missile capacity has led to sanctions on Iraq and has undermined the authority of the U. N. For 12 years, the international community has tried to persuade him to disarm and thereby avoid military conflict, most recently through the unanimous adoption of UNSCR 1441. The responsibility is his. If Saddam refuses even now to cooperate fully with the United Nations, he brings on himself the serious consequences foreseen in UNSCR 1441 and previous resolutions.

Remember that when an employee enters your office he is in a strange land. He feels the atmosphere of authority; he is constrained and hesitant. Make him feel at ease.

The weak, when they have authority, surround themselves with the weak. It is, indeed, a vice of rulers that men who have exceptional ability and worth are offensive to them, since they whose greatness is due to their position find it difficult to love those whom inner power makes great.

John Lancaster Spalding

I can now see that our needs meshed perfectly: my need to be swept away by a man, to be held securely and adored by a man, and his need to find the girl who would be pliable and receptive to his idea of a couple, who wouldn't question his unspoken authority. I don't mean he wanted a mouse—and he knew very well he wasn't getting one.

Standing armies are the oppressive instruments for governing the people, in the hands of hereditary and arbitrary monarchs. A military republic, a government founded on mock elections and supported only by the sword, is a movement indeed, but a retrograde and disastrous movement, from the regular and old-fashioned monarchical systems. If men would enjoy the blessings of republican government, they must govern themselves by reason, by mutual counsel and consultation, by a sense and feeling of general interest, and by the acquiescence of the minority in the will of the majority, properly expressed; and, above all, the military must be kept, according to the language of our Bill of Rights, in strict subordination to the civil authority.

A new State of Israel with broad frontiers, strong and solid, with the authority of the Israel Government extending from the Jordan to the Suez Canal.

That's a nice speech, Trujillo, Rybicki said. It doesn't make it true.
General, at the moment, I wouldn't place you as an authority on truth.

My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.

Charisma knows only inner determination and inner restraint.... The charismatic leader gains and maintains authority solely by proving his strength in life.

If it is not profitable for the common good that authority should be retained, it ought to be relinquished.

Barbara W. Tuchman

To the souls that have been shattered by the doubts and negativism of this century, we return the comfort of great truths. We do not question God and virtue; we do not question Country and History; we do not question authority and its prestige; we do not question Family and morals; we do not question the glory and duty of Work.

António de Oliveira Salazar

Absolute authority will be delegated. Full responsibility will be assumed. Those who succeed will receive advancement and satisfaction of desire. Those who fail will die.

What strained and anxious lives dogs must lead, so emotionally involved in the world of men, whose affections they strive endlessly to secure, whose authority they are expected unquestioningly to obey, and whose minds they can never do more than imperfectly reach and comprehend.

What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few?

Barbara W. Tuchman

A man's women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity.

I have heard that, with some persons, temperance – that is, moderation – is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent's authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself – which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue.

The significant development of the Harvard Band is chiefly attributable to the artistic skill and enterprise of Leroy Anderson. Anderson has a remarkable inborn sense of rhythm and magnetic authority as a conductor. While in college he was a ranking student in the Department of Music and has no small skill as a composer, as may be seen from his exciting potpourri Wintergreen for President, including tunes by Gershwin and some of his own.

Walter Raymond Spalding

To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.