Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"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

"No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know."

Eisenhower

"In most hierarchies, supercompetence is more objectionable than incompetence."

Laurence J. Peter

"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions."

Charles Wright Mills

"Privilege distorts the perspective and creates an aura of inaccessibility."

Heinrich Böll

"No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority."

Robert A. Heinlein

"The tone is gently authoritarian, leaving no doubt that this is the way the world is and no other way [....]Proclaimers of unassailable truths [....] The broadcast gives the impression of a short devotional in a living room chapel."

Hermann Rotermund

"When governments claim to derive their authority from any source other than the governed, it always leads to the destruction of liberty."

G. Edward Griffin

"It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely."

Walter Lippmann

"If a man is my servant, agent, or attorney, I necessarily make myself responsible for all his acts done within the limits of the power I have intrusted to him. If I have intrusted him, as my agent, with either absolute power, or any power at all, over the persons or properties of other men than myself, I thereby necessarily make myself responsible to those other persons for any injuries he may do them, so long as he acts within the limits of the power I have granted him. But no individual who may be injured in his person or property, by acts of Congress, can come to the individual electors, and hold them responsible for these acts of their so-called agents or representatives. This fact proves that these pretended agents of the people, of everybody, are really the agents of nobody."

Lysander Spooner

"When you give politicians the power to do what you think is right you're automatically giving politicians the power to do what you think is wrong."

Harry Browne

"The power of radio can be compared only with the power of the atomic bomb."

Paul Felix Lazarsfeld

"Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges."

George Orwell

"There are numerous sociological and historical case studies describing how opinions are established as "knowledge" in societies. For example, Paul Feyerabend explained in 1975 that the establishment of the heliocentric worldview was not based on new discoveries, but on a clever propaganda strategy of Galileo Galilei. According to Feyerabend, the representatives of the geocentric world view "did not recognize the propaganda value of predictions and dramatic shows, nor did they make use of the intellectual and social power of the newly created classes. They lost because they did not take advantage of existing opportunities.""

Paul Feyerabend

"Power is the chance to impose your will within a social context, even when opposed and regardless of the integrity of that chance."

Max Weber

"Charisma is the gift from above where a leader knows from inside himself what to do."

Max Weber

"The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and the mighty are selected and formed by the means of power, the sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity, which prevail in their society. They are not men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked with the world of knowledge and sensibility. They are not men shaped by nationally responsible parties that debate openly and clearly the issues this nation now so unintelligently confronts. They are not men held in responsible check by a plurality of voluntary associations which connect debating publics with the pinnacles of decision. Commanders of power unequaled in human history, they have succeeded within the American system of organized irresponsibility."

Charles Wright Mills