Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"The religious belief in authority aims at the enslavement of the mind. It teaches people that it is moral and good to hand over their time, energy, property, freedom, and self-determination to a ruling class. The enslavement of the mind makes the enslavement of the body unnecessary.

In truth, the belief in "government" is a religion, made up of a set of dogmatic teachings, irrational doctrines which fly in the face of both evidence and logic, and which are methodically memorized and repeated by the faithful. Like other religions, the gospel of "government" describes a superhuman, supernatural entity, above mere mortals, which issues commandments to the peasantry, for whom unquestioning obedience is a moral imperative."

Larken Rose

"…Whoever has the power in society determines what can be studied, determines what can be observed, determines what can be thought. Scientists fall in line with the dominant power structure. They have to, because the power structure pays the bills. You don’t play ball with the power structure, you don’t get money for research, you don’t get an appointment, you don’t get published, in short you don’t count anymore. You’re out. You might as well be dead."

Michael Crichton

"The European authorities are effectively lending Greece money so Greece can repay the money it borrowed from them."

Wolfgang Streeck

"Families, authority, communities, and social ranks are the empirical-sociological concretization of the abstract philosophical-praxeological categories and concepts of property, production, exchange, and contract. Property and property relations do not exist apart from families and kinship relations."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"The authority to admit or exclude anyone from any territory should be stripped from the hands of the central government and re-assigned to the states, counties, cities, towns, villages, residential districts, and ultimately to the owners of private households and their voluntary associations."

Hans-Hermann Hoppe

"Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later."

Allan Bloom

"There are a lot of people who want to give orders and be bossy that don't deserve respect."

John Trudell

"Leadership does not depend on being right."

Ivan Illich

"You don't have to hold a position to be a leader."

Henry Ford

"A Black person is more likely to become president in Washington than a non-Black person is to become a boss in Munich."

Rudolf Augstein

"Leadership is the ability to get a person to do what you want him to do, when you want it done, in a way you want it done, because he wants to do it."

Eisenhower

"Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it."

Laurence J. Peter

"It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another, there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power."

Albert Jay Nock

"The three most important ways to lead people are:... by example... by example... by example."

Albert Schweitzer

"Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing."

Albert Schweitzer

"The United States has become a place where entertainers and professional athletes are mistaken for people of importance."

Robert A. Heinlein

"Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system."

Charles Wright Mills

"The truth is, I have absolutely no professional credentials - literally, which is why I'm teaching at MIT."

Noam Chomsky