Quotes on Authority

People want guidance, not rhetoric. They need to know what the plan of action is, and how it will be implemented. They want to be given responsibility to help solve the problem and authority to act on it.

Never had I understood that I command, with absolute authority, the ship of my life! I decide its mission and rules and discipline, at my word waits every tool and sail, every cannon, the strength of every soul on board. I'm master of a team of passionate skills to sail me through hell's own jaws the second I nod the direction to steer.

The peaceful transfer of authority is rare in history, yet common in our country. With a simple oath, we affirm old traditions and make new beginnings.

Lest we forget, the birth of modern physics and cosmology was achieved by Galileo, Kepler and Newton breaking free not from the close confining prison of faith (all three were believing Christians, of one sort or another) but from the enormous burden of the millennial authority of Aristotelian science. The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not a revival of Hellenistic science but its final defeat.

Money has transformed every watchdog, every independent authority. Medical doctors are increasingly gulled by the lobbying of pharmaceutical salesmen.

Example acquires tenfold authority when it speaks from the grave.

The laws only can determine the punishment of crimes, and the authority of making penal laws can only reside with the legislator, who represents the whole society united by the social compact.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

Most men, after a little freedom, have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy of effort it brings.

Let men learn that a legislature is not 'our God upon earth,' though, by the authority they ascribe to it, and the things they expect from it, they would seem to think it is. Let them learn rather that it is an institution serving a purely temporary purpose, whose power, when not stolen, is at the best borrowed.

Whence, then, this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.

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.

If that glad message of your Bible were written in your faces, you would not need to demand belief in the authority of that book in such stiff-necked fashion.

And by virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

Authority, power, and wealth do not change a man; they only reveal him

We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris.

My respect for human beings is based not on the colour of a man’s skin nor authority he may wield, but purely on merit.

...any belief in supernatural creators, rulers, or influencers of natural or human process introduces an irreparable split into the universe, and prevents us from grasping its real unity. Any belief in Absolutes, whether the absolute validity of moral commandments, of authority of revelation, of inner certitudes, or of divine inspiration, erects a formidable barrier against progress and the responsibility of improvement, moral, rational, and religious.

The belief in authority is the source of conscience; which is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man, but the voice of some men in man.

We worship not the Graces, nor the Parcae, but Fashion. She spins and weaves and cuts with full authority. The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.

I don't believe in competitions between artists. This is insane. Who has the authority to say someone is better?