Authority Quotes – Insights on Power and Leadership

"Peace is only got by peaceful methods. To fight the establishment with their own weapons is no good because they always win and they’ve been winning for thousands of years. They know how to play the game 'violence'. What they don’t know how to handle is peaceful humour"

John Lennon

"Peace is only possible through freedom, freedom only through truth. Therefore, untruth is the real evil that destroys all peace: untruth ranging from concealment to blind indifference, from lies to inner dishonesty, from thoughtlessness to doctrinaire fanaticism, from the untruthfulness of the individual to the untruthfulness of the public sphere."

Karl Jaspers

"No one you teach to think can ever obey as before. Not out of a rebellious spirit, but because of the habit of examining all things when in doubt."

Hannah Arendt

"....there are wolves hiding in the gray herd, that is, individuals who still know what freedom is. (...) That is the nightmare of those in power."

Ernst Jünger

"I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers."

John D. Rockefeller

"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system–ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

"This is the psychology of people who, when a country has become a dictatorship, cry out, ‘I'm not to blame! I only wanted the government to control prices, wages, profits, industry, science, health care, the arts, education, television, and the press! I was never in favor of a dictatorship!’"

Ayn Rand

"Legal bankruptcy is the inability of a legal system to provide justice to those subject to the law. An institution, especially a legal institution, reveals legal bankruptcy, for example, when it allows liars to rise to the top, makes graffiti artists into clerks, fraudsters into cashiers, forgers into recorders, impostors into assessors, and blackmailers into legal supervisors. Under such circumstances, the only promise of improvement lies in a complete return to generally accepted values (e.g., truth, freedom) and legal principles (e.g., pacta sunt servanda, prohibition of arbitrariness, competition, etc.)."

Gerhard Köbler

"I’m from Germany and I think history is repeating itself right now. Germany is becoming a police state. You are constantly asked for your papers. It’s just like in the Hitler era."

Julia Dietze

"That was when lies entered Russia. The main misery was the loss of faith in the value of one's own opinion. People imagined that the time when they followed the dictates of moral sensibility was over. Now they had to conform to the norm and abide by the rules of the community. This aberration of society took hold of everything, infected everything. Everything fell under its influence."

Boris Pasternak

"All dictatorships feed on the fear of their subjects."

Richard von Weizsäcker

"The state is, by its very nature and essence, a social institution imposed by a victorious group of people on a defeated group of people for the sole purpose of regulating the rule of the former over the latter and securing it against internal uprisings and external attacks. And this rule has no other ultimate purpose than the economic exploitation of the defeated by the victors."

Franz Oppenheimer

"We’ve been conditioned to think that only politicians can solve our problems. But at some point, maybe we will wake-up and recognize that it was the politicians who created our problems"

Ben Carson

"The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas in every epoch, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has at its disposal the means of material production has at the same time at its disposal the means of intellectual production, so that, on average, the thoughts of those who lack the means of intellectual production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the ruling material conditions, the ruling material conditions conceived as ideas; that is, the conditions that make one class the ruling class, the ideas of its rule."

Marx/Engels

"The road to tyranny, we must never forget, begins with the destruction of the truth."

Bill Clinton

"A free people must not only be armed and disciplined. They should also be sufficiently equipped with weapons and ammunition to defend their independence at any time against anyone who attempts to abuse them. This includes, in particular, their own government."

George Washington

"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."

Ayn Rand

"The great cease to rule when the small cease to crawl"

Friedrich Schiller