Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"He who tells the stories rules the society."

Platon

"If you want to test a man's character, give him power."

Abraham Lincoln

"When a physician walks behind the coffin of his patient, indeed the cause sometimes follows the effect."

Robert Koch

"I do not like the pretensions of Government -- the grounds on which it demands my obedience -- to be pitched too high. I don't like the medicine-man's magical pretensions nor the Bourbon's Divine Right. This is not solely because I disbelieve in magic and in Bossuet's Politique. I believe in God, but I detest theocracy. For every Government consists of mere men and is, strictly viewed, a makeshift; if it adds to its commands 'Thus saith the Lord', it lies, and lies dangerously. On just the same ground I dread government in the name of science. That is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. They 'cash in'. It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science. Perhaps the real scientists may not think much of the tyrants' 'science'-- they didn't think much of Hitler's racial theories or Stalin's biology. But they can be muzzled."

Clive Staples Lewis

"One of the biggest problems with college degrees is they've made a lot of people think they are much smarter than they truly are. This arrogance and smugness makes them dumber because they think they're too smart to receive new information from anybody with fewer 'credentials'."

ZUBY

"ELECTOR, n. One who enjoys the sacred privilege of voting for the man of another man's choice."

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce

"Ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign."

Barack Hussein Obama II

"Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him."

Epiktet

"Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right."

H. L. Mencken

"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

"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 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

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

Felix Frankfurter

"Universal suffrage did not give the masses the right to decide, but to approve the decision of one elite or another."

José Ortega y Gasset

"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