Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"The holders of authority and those who take advantage of it must convince people of this fiction and put to sleep their realistic, that is to say, critical, faculty of thought. Every thinking person knows the methods of propaganda, methods by which critical judgment is destroyed and the mind is lulled until it submits to clichés that stultify people because they make them dependent, depriving them of the ability to trust their eyes and their judgment. This function, in which they believe, blinds them to reality."

Erich Fromm

"It took us a thousand years to realize that we do not need emperors, kings, and princes to dictate what we must do and refrain from doing. Hopefully, we will not need another thousand years to understand that we also do not need governments, parties, politicians, or officials for that."

Roland Baader

"When a fool gets a gram of power, he believes he has a ton of authority"

Friedrich Nietzsche

"I mean science, as an institution, is interested in gaining the power — to gain control over the world — to be able to gain control over diseases, over the human body, over the environment, over rivers and animals and forests. You have to submit a grant to somebody to fund, it all comes down to money, in many cases. It’s also an institution- If you’re a freelance scientist, you just explore the truth. Okay. But in an institution, a university, you need money to finance so you submit a research grant, and you have to convince the authority not of the truth. You have to convince the authority that what you want to do will somehow make us more powerful. Will somehow enable us to produce a new weapon. Will somehow enable us to produce more food. Will somehow enable us to gain control over previously uncontrollable, or deadly disease. And this is really what gets the money. Of course, it means to also be truth to some extent. Does it work and who wants it?"

Yuval Noah Harari

"The power system continues only as long as individuals try to get something for nothing. The day when a majority of individuals declares or acts as if it wants nothing from the government, declares that it will look after its own welfare and interests, then on that day the power elites are doomed."

Antony Cyril Sutton

"The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution. But it will be instituted only by there being more and more people who do not require the protection of governmental power and by there being more and more people who will be ashamed of applying this power."

Lew Nikolajewitsch Graf Tolstoi

"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all."

Strobe Talbott

"Today the path of total dictatorship in the United States can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by the Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system, another body representing another form of government - a bureaucratic elite."

William Jenner

"The real rulers in Washington are invisible, and exercise power from behind the scenes."

Felix Frankfurter

"All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to 'the will of the people' the expression which the few desire."

Vilfredo Pareto

"We always give the public their heroes. We give the heroes to every faction, and then people once they hear this person say all the right things, we give releases to them because he or she speaks for ‘me’. We say go there go do that and they do it. We give our power to the authorized heroes."

Albert Pike

"The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter"

Elon Musk

"I’m testifying and getting everybody riled up for the power of almighty rock ‘n’ roll"

Paul Stanley

"We were raised by people who dutifully follow the rules of state power. We were brought up to follow the rules & not question the state. But now malicious people make the rules. It's time to teach our children something different."

The Libertarian Pilot

"Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority."

Francis Bacon

"Truth is the child of time, not of authority."

Bertolt Brecht

"Senator LaFollette publicly charged that a money trust of fifty men controlled the United States. George F. Baker, partner of J.P. Morgan, on being queried by reporters as to the truth of the charge, replied that it was absolutely in error. He said that he knew from personal knowledge that not more than eight men ran this country."

Eustace Clarence Mullins

"Those who know the least obey the best."

George Farquhar