In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated.
Ordinary men are given the authority of the priesthood. Worthiness and willingness - not experience, expertise, or education - are the qualifications for priesthood ordination.
You either believe that people respond to authority, or that they respond to kindness and inclusion. I'm obviously in the latter camp. I think that people respond better to reward than punishment.
Authority is quite degrading.
We don't name God; God reveals His name to us. We don't have the right to exercise authority over God. God copyrights, He trademarks, He patents His name.
The driving force behind doing everything that I've been doing as a stand-up is having problems with authority and not liking to be told what to do.
When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.
We cannot simply speak out against an escalation of troops in Iraq, we must act to prevent it. . . There can be no doubt that the Constitution gives Congress the authority to decide whether to fund military action, and Congress can demand a justification from the president for such action before it appropriates the funds to carry it out.
Embracing new things often requires us to embrace our fears, however trivial they may seem. You deal with fear not by pretending it doesn't exist, but by refusing to give it decision-making authority.
New faces have more authority than accustomed ones.
Our success as consultants will depend upon the essential rightness of the advice we give and our capacity for convincing those in authority that it is good.
Tempered intuition is more than beneficial. It's usually critical to resolving gray area problems. In other words, in the end, these problems are resolved by someone in a position of authority saying this is what I think we should do and will do to address this problem.
The invocation of science, of its ground rules, of the exclusive validity of the methods that science has now completely become, now constitutes a surveillance authority punishing free, uncoddled, undisciplined thought and tolerating nothing of mental activity other than what has been methodologically sanctioned. Science and scholarship, the medium of autonomy, has degenerated into an instrument of heteronomy.
The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool.
Anarchism, in my view, is an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary. They have to demonstrate, with powerful argument, that that conclusion is correct. If they cannot, then the institutions they defend should be considered illegitimate. How one should react to illegitimate authority depends on circumstances and conditions: there are no formulas.
Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge -- fitter to bruise than polish.
The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed
They must find it hard to take Truth for authority who have so long mistaken Authority for Truth.
To resist him that is set in authority is evil