Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"Power on the one side, fear on the other, are always the buttresses on which irrational authority is built."

Erich Fromm

"In any given society the authority of man over man runs in inverse proportion to the intellectual development of that society."

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

"Whenever we accept an idea as authority instead of as instrument, an idol is set up. We worship the plough, and not the fruit."

Walter Lippmann

"Grades don't measure anything other than your relevant obedience to a manager."

John Taylor Gatto

"The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders."

John Taylor Gatto

"If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway."

Edward Bernays

"Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.Aristocracy with the meaning - the best are ruling.Peoples do never govern themselves. That lunacy was concocted by liberalism. Behind its people's sovereignty the slyest cheaters are hiding, who don't want to be recognized."

Joseph Goebbels

"The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter."

Hannah Arendt

"Authenticity is about imperfection. And authenticity is a very human quality. To be authentic is to be at peace with your imperfections. The great leaders are not the strongest, they are the ones who are honest about their weaknesses. The great leaders are not the smartest; they are the ones who admit how much they don't know. The great leaders can't do everything; they are the ones who look to others to help them. Great leaders don't see themselves as great; they see themselves as human."

Simon O. Sinek

"We authors are powerless, but we are not helpless."

Heinrich Böll

"If an agency is the ultimate judge in every case of conflict, then it is also judge in all conflicts involving itself. Consequently, instead of merely preventing and resolving conflict, a monopolist of ultimate decision making will also cause and provoke conflict in order to settle it to his own advantage. That is, if one can only appeal to the state for justice, justice will be perverted in the favor of the state, constitutions and supreme courts notwithstanding."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Most of these students are so conditioned to success that they become afraid to take risks. They have been taught from a young age by zealous parents, schools, and institutional authorities what constitutes failure and success. They are socialized to obey. They obsess over grades and seek to please professors, even if what professors teach is fatuous. The point is to get ahead, and getting ahead means deference to authority. Challenging authority is never a career advancer."

Chris Hedges

"[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important ... so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth."

Robert A. Heinlein

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders."

Edward L. Bernays

"You can't call any one person the devil. Because no one person has the power to be the devil."

Earl Simmons DMX

"We have power... Our power isn’t in a political system, or a religious system, or in an economic system, or in a military system; these are authoritarian systems... they have power... but it’s not reality. The power of our intelligence, individually or collectively IS the power; this is the power that any industrial ruling class truly fears: clear coherent human beings."

John Trudell

"It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do."

Steve Jobs

"I believe that the teacher's place and work in the school is to be interpreted from this same basis. The teacher is not in the school to impose certain ideas or to form certain habits in the child, but is there as a member of the community to select the influences which shall affect the child and to assist him in properly responding to these influences."

John Dewey