Authority Quotes - page 51

The Revolution was in full swing. The struggle was becoming increasingly irreconcilable and bloodier, much of what was happening did not fit in with my outlook. But after all there was still the unfinished task, women's liberation. Women, of course, had received all rights but in practice, of course, they still lived under the old yoke: without authority in family life, enslaved by a thousand menial household chores, bearing the whole burden of maternity, even the material cares, because many women now found life alone as a result of the war and other circumstances. (Alexandra Kollontai)
A border is a completely imaginary line on a paper or cybernetic map that has no genuine counterpart in the real world. Do not mistake it for a property line. It is possible, in some instances, for a border to be congruent with a property line, but they are not the same thing at all. One represents the geographical limit of a military and political claim to authority over a given territory. The other is part of the description of something - in this case, land - lawfully owned by an individual or a voluntary and contractual association of individuals. View quote
L. Neil Smith
The Bill of Rights was, unfortunately misnamed. It was not a list of things Americans were allowed too do, under the Constitution. It was and remains a list of things government is absolutely forbidden to do - like set up a state religion, or steal your house - under any circumstances. The Bill of Rights was the make-or-break condition that allowed the Constitution to be ratified. No Bill of Rights, no Constitution. And since all political authority in America "trickles down" from the Constitution, no Constitution no government. And, since the Bill of Rights was passed as a unit, a single breach, in any one of the ten articles, breaches them all and with them, the entire Constitution. Every last bit of the authority that derives from it becomes null and void. Let's review: No Second Amendment, no Bill of Rights. No Bill of Rights, no Constitution. No Constitution, no government. View quote
L. Neil Smith
The Bill of Rights must be subjected to no 'interpretation' of any kind except in terms of the original intent of the Founding Fathers, a group of individuals who had just barely defeated the most overbearing, ruthless, and dangerously violent government in the history of the world. Even the British people were having trouble with it at the time. The Bill of Rights represents an historic bargain between those who advocated a strong central government - and whose political ideas and wishes are expressed in the main body of the Constitution - and those who did not. Without the Bill of Rights, the Constitution ceases to be valid; any legitimate authority that derives from it ceases to exist. View quote
L. Neil Smith
My problem has always been with authority, and I'm sure if anybody understands that, it's people in uniform. View quote
Lewis Black
My speaking style was criticised by no less an authority than Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a low moment, my friends, to have my rhetorical skills denounced by a monosyllabic Austrian cyborg. View quote
Boris Johnson
I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great. View quote
Jimmy Wales
The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. View quote
Lionel Trilling
I believe that if Israel were to put an end to the settlements in the West Bank tomorrow, as it did in Gaza, there would still be reluctance on the part of the Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish secular democracy. View quote
Alan Dershowitz
The essence of Christianity is the appeal to the life of Christ as a revelation of the nature of God and of God's agency in the world. The record is fragmentary, inconsistent, and uncertain.... But there can be no doubt as to what elements in the record have evoked a response from all that is best in human nature. The Mother, the Child, and the bare manger the lowly man, homeless and self-forgetful, with his message of peace, love, and sympathy the suffering, the agony, the tender words as life ebbed, the final despair and the whole with the authority of supreme victory. View quote
Alfred North Whitehead
Each such answer to the great question, invariably asserted by the followers of its propounder, if not by himself, to be complete and final, remains in high authority and esteem, it may be for one century, or it may be for twenty: but, as invariably, Time proves each reply to have been a mere approximation to the truth tolerable chiefly on account of the ignorance of those by whom it was accepted, and wholly intolerable when tested by the larger knowledge of their successors. (Thomas Henry Huxley)
Find ways to decentralize. Move decision making authority down and out. Encourage a more entrepreneurial approach. View quote
Donald Rumsfeld
Move decisions out to the Cabinet and agencies. Strengthen them by moving responsibility, authority, and accountability their direction. View quote
Donald Rumsfeld
The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority. View quote
Nikolai Berdyaev
Confucius was not so much a philosopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition. View quote
Slavoj Žižek
Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. View quote
Philip Roth
[Nietzsche's] definition of cruelty informs Artaud's own, declaring that all art embodies and intensifies the underlying brutalities of life to recreate the thrill of experience ... Although Artaud did not formally cite Nietzsche, [their writing] contains a familiar persuasive authority, a similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis. View quote
Antonin Artaud
The method of authority will always govern the mass of mankind; and those who wield the various forms of organized force in the state will never be convinced that dangerous reasoning ought not to be suppressed in some way. View quote
Charles Sanders Peirce
Which had the fairer pretext for warfare, we may not know: each has high authority to support him; for, if the victor had the gods on his side, the vanquished had Cato. View quote
Lucan
At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, and Jacksonville, the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority, and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war, and orders of the President of the United States, the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such. View quote
William Tecumseh Sherman
The task I am called upon to perform today is to my thinking by no means a merely formal or easy matter. It fills me with deep concern to give an address, with such authority as a president's chair confers, upon a science which, though still in a purely nascent stage, seems to me at least as important as any other science whatever. Psychical science, as we here try to pursue it, is the embryo of something which in time may dominate the whole world of thought. (William Crookes)
PLENIPOTENTIARY, adj. Having full power. A Minister Plenipotentiary is a diplomatist possessing absolute authority on condition that he never exert it. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
RIGHT, n. Legitimate authority to be, to do or to have as the right to be a king, the right to do one's neighbor, the right to have measles, and the like. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
SCEPTER, n. A king's staff of office, the sign and symbol of his authority. It was originally a mace with which the sovereign admonished his jester and vetoed ministerial measures by breaking the bones of their proponents. View quote
Ambrose Bierce
MACE, n. A staff of office signifying authority. Its form, that of a heavy club, indicates its original purpose and use in dissuading from dissent. View quote
Ambrose Bierce