Authority Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government...

Eleanor Roosevelt

Wrest once the law to your authority:
To do a great right, do a little wrong.

William Shakespeare

I think it will be found that he who speaks with most authority on a given subject is not ignorant of what has been said by his predecessors. He will take his place in a regular order, and substantially add his own knowledge to the knowledge of previous generations.

Henry David Thoreau

Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindliness in favor of systematic hatred.

Bertrand Russell

More than 80 per cent of the British casualties of the Great War were English. More than 80 per cent of the taxation is paid by the English taxpayers. We are entitled to mention these facts, and to draw authority and courage from them.

Winston Churchill

The first foundation for the creation of authority is always provided by popularity.

Leadership means that a group, large or small, is willing to entrust authority to a person who has shown judgement, wisdom, personal appeal, and proven competence.

Nothing more enhances authority than silence. It is the crowning virtue of the strong, the refuge of the weak, the modesty of the proud, the pride of the humble, the prudence of the wise, and the sense of fools. To speak is to... dissipate one's strength; whereas what action demands is concentration. Silence is a necessary preliminary to the ordering of one's thoughts.

Charles de Gaulle

It Is narrated on the authority of Abu Malik: I heard the Messenger of Allah (may peace be upon him) say: He who professed that there is no god but Allah and made a denial of everything which the people worship beside Allah, his property and blood became inviolable, an their affairs rest with Allah.

Lawful and settled authority is very seldom resisted when it is well employed.

I repeat that in this sense the most splendid court in Christendom is provincial, having authority to consult about Transalpine interests only, and not the affairs of Rome. A praetor or proconsul would suffice to settle the questions which absorb the attention of the English Parliament and the American Congress.

Henry David Thoreau

Nothing of importance is ever achieved without discipline. I feel myself sometimes not wholly in sympathy with some modern educational theorists, because I think that they underestimate the part that discipline plays. But the discipline you have in your life should be one determined by your own desires and your own needs, not put upon you by society or authority.

Bertrand Russell

The faults of a writer of acknowledged excellence are more dangerous, because the influence of his example is more extensive; and the interest of learning requires that they should be discovered and stigmatized, before they have the sanction of antiquity conferred upon them, and become precedents of indisputable authority.

Laws gain their authority from actual possession and custom: it is perilous to go back to their origins; laws, like our rivers, get greater and nobler as they roll along: follow them back upstream to their sources and all you find is a tiny spring, hardly recognizable; as time goes by it swells with pride and grows in strength.

Michel de Montaigne

To bring about government by oligarchy, masquerading as democracy, it is fundamentally essential that practically all authority and control be centralized in our Federal government... The individual sovereignty of our states must first be destroyed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

For rightly is truth called the daughter of time, not of authority.

Though authority be a stubborn bear, yet he is oft let by the nose with gold.

William Shakespeare

It is almost always the unhappiness of a victorious disputant to destroy his own authority by claiming too many consequences, or diffusing his proposition to an indefensible extent.

Impulse, subjectivity and profanation, the old adversaries of materialistic alienation, now succumb to it.... The representatives of the opposition to the authoritarian schema become witnesses to the authority of commercial success.... In the service of success they renounce that insubordinate character which was theirs.

Theodor W. Adorno

He who in reasoning cites authority is making use of his memory rather than of his intellect.

Leonardo da Vinci

Again men have been kept back as by a kind of enchantment from progress in science by reverence for antiquity, by the authority of men counted great in philosophy, and then by general consent.

The reliance on authority measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Royal authority is a great spring that should move easily and noiselessly.

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.

Raymond Chandler

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. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

Raymond Chandler