Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how."

Josef Stalin

"In life, a decent person has so many ways to get ahead. A bad guy with the same smarts and drive has all those same ways open to them, but also some others that a decent person wouldn't go down. So, they have more chances to get ahead. As a result of this negative selection of character, the higher social classes become enriched with scoundrels. The better and more influential a social class is, the worse its average ethical level becomes. Only this circumstance can explain why the world has not been a paradise for at least five thousand years. One must know this if one wants to understand world history."

Hermann Julius Oberth

"What good is it for a person to learn to read and write if they leave the thinking to others?"

Ernst R. Hauschka

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."

David Rockefeller

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

Hannah Arendt

"The lie of tyranny is that you will maintain the freedom of life by obeying authority. The choices it offers you are a lifetime of obedience or death. Evil is the master of deceit. The objective of evil is not violence, but obedience. The purpose of violence is to compel obedience. Its design is the destruction of freedom. Whether submitting to authority and obeying, or allowing it to destroy you physically, you will have lost your freedom. The only way to maintain freedom is to fight tyranny at all times and at all costs."

Jeremy Locke

"School is a sophisticated means of control by the state, created (or usurped from similar approaches by competing entities—churches, cities, private individuals) to accustom all citizens to obedience from childhood, to instill in them the suggestion of the necessity of the state, to nip any idea of emancipation in the bud, to steer the development of their thinking into well-maintained channels, and to drill them into comfortably governable, humble subjects."

Walter Borgius

"Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave"

Frederick Douglass

"A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years."

Lysander Spooner

"For more than a century ideological extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over American political and economic institutions. Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

David Rockefeller

"We should never forget that the constitution wasn't written to restrain citizens' behavior. It was written to restrain the government's behavior."

Rand Paul

"Yes. I have decided that I will no longer work for public broadcasters for the foreseeable future, which means, for example, that I will no longer shoot any episodes of ”Tatort." I recently had two requests for public broadcasting productions, both of which I turned down. Because I don't want anything to do with the way they handled their reporting during the coronavirus pandemic. The one-sidedness and obvious government loyalty of ARD and ZDF leave me speechless."

Tom Bohn

"The state school system is a military system, modeled on and implemented from Prussian militarism. It is a chain of command from the government to the minister of education to the state secretary to the school inspector to the principal to the teacher to the student. The order: to implement the curriculum prescribed from above. This is a kind of state terror, intellectual terror."

Axel Burkart

"In schools, children learn above all to accept the system, to work for paper money, and not to question the government. They do not learn to make peace, to forgive, to be helpful to all people, and certainly not wisdom.
It is a breeding ground for training the future workhorses of the elites to be puppets loyal to the system."

Matthias Lubos

"Young people are accused of using violence. But are we not in a perpetual state of violence? Because we were born and raised in prison, we no longer notice that we are stuck in a hole with our hands and feet chained and a gag in our mouths. What do you call a lawful state? A law that turns the vast majority of citizens into servile cattle in order to satisfy the unnatural needs of an insignificant and corrupt minority? And this law, supported by brute military force and the stupid cleverness of its agents, this law is eternal, brute force, contrary to justice and common sense, and I will fight against it with my mouth and my hands wherever I can."

Karl Georg Büchner

""In a money-driven sham democracy, the financial system takes precedence over the law." This is state-legalized fraud. The consequences of this fraud are: exploitation of people and nature, quantitative growth pressure, national debt, privatization, progressive impoverishment of many people, concentration of wealth and power among the richest, corruption, crises, and wars. The mainstream media, corporations, and the ruling political puppets are all part of this fraudulent system."

Rico Albrecht

"The true purpose of man, not that which is dictated by changing inclinations, but that which is dictated by eternal and unchanging reason, is the highest and most proportionate development of his powers into a whole. Freedom is the first and indispensable condition for this development. (...) It is precisely the diversity that arises from the union of many that is the highest good that society offers, and this diversity is certainly always lost to the extent that the state interferes. It is no longer actually the members of a nation who live together in community, but individual subjects who enter into a relationship with the state, i.e., with the spirit that prevails in its government, and indeed into a relationship in which the superior power of the state already inhibits the free play of forces. Uniform causes have uniform effects. The more the state intervenes, the more similar not only everything that acts becomes, but also everything that is acted upon. (...) But anyone who reasons in this way for others is, not without reason, suspected of misunderstanding humanity and wanting to turn people into machines."

Alexander von Humboldt

"The system absorbs those who think they can utilize it. Nor can there be any question of finding a modus vivendi or achieving attenuations. It has been demonstrated how the liberal state becomes an authoritarian state. The course is set and no accommodation will be either lasting or sufficient. In face of this absolute power, only an absolutely negative position is viable. What we have in mind is the attitude that conscientous objectors take on a specific point, and not without good reason. In the present set-up the anarchist attitude of a total refusal of validity or legitimacy to any authority of any kind seems to me to be the only valid and viable one. The point is not to enforce a particular view of society but to establish a counterbalance, a protest, a sign of cleavage. In face of an absolute power only a total confrontation has any meaning."

Jacques Ellul