1,121 Quotes About Authority

The one who love power becomes dictator and one who admires power becomes slave.

Nothing is taken at face value anymore, everything must be dissected. Perhaps it is the rise of advertisement over church and state. Things once spoken were spoken with strength and authority. Now they are spoken with stealth and with guile. They are spoken not to the rational mind but to the sub-conscious, the mind within the mind.

Words frozen in religious texts, when not allowed to be interpreted in the current context, lead to irrationality with religious leaders having the exclusive authority of rationalizing it.

Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over others, yet it is spiritually unwarranted. By that point he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove that unwarranted dominion by seizing the role of a condemner.

Perhaps one is to first learn the signifiers denoting esteem and conveying authority and from there build the foundation of knowledge based upon this arbitrary system of reputational faith. This logic seems agreeable to me—one must start somewhere, after all!—but, at the same time, I would first have to convince myself that there is something, anything at all, worth knowing. Right now, even this seems a rather challenging proposition.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The vanities of life:pleasure, possession, position and power.

Each individual possesses a conscience which to a greater or lesser degree serves to restrain the unimpeded flow of impulses destructive to others. But when he merges his person into an organizational structure, a new creature replaces autonomous man, unhindered by the limitations of individual morality, freed of humane inhibition, mindful only of the sanctions of authority.

Ego is an illusion of I.