Quotes on Authority

We have one authority and one law and everyone has the responsibility to follow that law and that authority.

Author: Mahmoud Abbas

By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes is his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

Author: John Acton

The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.

Author: Lord Acton

The man whose authority is recent is always stern.

Author: Aeschylus

It is fundamentally important that Grasso resign so that the New York Stock Exchange can restore its moral authority.

Author: Phil Angelides

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Author: Hannah Arendt

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

Author: Ibrahim Babangida

Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter.

Author: Paul Bailey

As a result of my study, I came to the conclusion that a common supreme authority was undesirable.

Author: Fredrik Bajer

The Palestinian Authority refuses on an ongoing basis to take the necessary steps to prevent terrorists from getting into Israel.

Author: David Baker

Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect.

Author: Bruno Bettelheim

But I was amazed at how organized the Palestinian election authority was, how competent they were in setting up their polling places and the poll workers they had.

Author: Joe Biden

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.

Author: Allan Bloom

Now they call in all of the authority figures they can find and hire them - the cost has gone up. The picture may or may not get better, but definitely, it gets more cumbersome.

Author: Don Bluth

Of course the UN brings in a lot of moral authority.

Author: Lakhdar Brahimi

This means that the search for a formula of European cooperation in connection with the League of Nations, far from weakening the authority of this latter must and can only tend to strengthen it, for it is closely connected with its aims.

Author: Aristide Briand

I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority.

Author: Rita Brown

Any commander who fails to exceed his authority is not of much use to his subordinates.

Author: Arleigh Burke

All my authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.

Author: Jesus Christ

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

Author: Marcus Cicero

A leading authority is anyone who has guessed right more than once.

Author: Frank Clark

Don't name it, as they say, because instantly you offer it to this peculiar authority.

Author: Robert Creeley

Foreign nationals entering the United States illegally who are taken into custody by the Border Protection Corps or by State or local law enforcement authorities must be promptly delivered to a federal law enforcement authority.

Author: John Culberson

In revolutions authority remains with the greatest scoundrels.

Author: Georges Danton

The decisions of law courts should never be printed: in the long run, they form a counter authority to the law.

Author: Denis Diderot

You can delegate authority, but you cannot delegate responsibility.

Author: Byron Dorgan

Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.

Author: Norman Douglas

Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.

Author: Maureen Dowd

And I have been campaigning for the past three months trying to get the Senate Judiciary Committee that has the oversight authority and responsibility to start its own public hearings.

Author: Sibel Edmonds

I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.

Author: Albert Einstein

I created no authority that wasn't already there under the constitution.

Author: John Engler

New faces have more authority than accustomed ones.

Author: Euripides

Those who enjoy responsibility usually get it; those who merely like exercising authority usually lose it.

Author: Malcolm Forbes

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Author: Michel Foucault

The dead and past stories that I have told again in divers fashions, are not set down without authority.

Author: Marie France

A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.

Author: Brendan Francis

Moral authority is never retained by any attempt to hold on to it. It comes without seeking and is retained without effort.

Author: Mohandas Gandhi

I grew up to always respect authority and respect those in charge.

Author: Charles Gaulle

Nor bigots who but one way see, through blinkers of authority.

Author: Matthew Green

The burnt odor in Washington is from the disintegrating authority of the governing classes.

Author: William Greider

Whenever there is authority, there is a natural inclination to disobedience.

Author: Thomas Haliburton

Most kids will not volunteer to eat veggies. At times you must step up to the plate and enforce the rule of authority as a parent.

Author: Lee Haney

Everywhere, authority and tradition have to justify themselves in the face of questions.

Author: Gustav Heinemann

No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.

Author: Robert Heinlein

Authority pisses me off. I think everyone should be able to drink and get loud whenever they want.

Author: James Hetfield

We have to give value to authority. We have to give value to office, being in office, holding office.

Author: James Hillman

The ultimate court of appeal is observation and experiment... not authority.

Author: Thomas Huxley

'Referring the matter to a committee' can be a device for diluting authority, diffusing responsibility and delaying decisions.

Author: Antony Jay

Eighty percent of the problems that beset unification immediately disappeared when the President signed the bill increasing the authority and the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense.

Author: Louis Johnson

The last job I applied for was to be a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority in 1957.

Author: Vernon Jordan

Lawyer acted without authority from our band. He had no right to sell the Wallowa country.

Author: Chief Joseph

I do not espouse the unitarian position. President Clinton's assertion of directive authority over administration, more than President Reagan's assertion of a general supervisory authority, raises serious constitutional questions.

Author: Elena Kagan

The Hamas organization is unwilling to honor the obligations that the Palestinian Authority has signed.

Author: Moshe Katsav

Courtrooms contain every symbol of authority that a set designer could imagine. Everyone stands up when you come in. You wear a costume identifying you as, if not quite divine, someone special.

Author: Irving Kaufman

The proper balance between individual liberty and central authority is a very ancient problem.

Author: Arthur Keith

I prize the conditions under which I have lived because they have permitted me to choose my opportunities, to inquire into such matters as interested me, and to publish what I believed to be true, uncontrolled by any central authority.

Author: Arthur Keith

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.

Author: Dalai Lama

Conventional dogmas, even if endowed with the authority of an Aristotle - ancient or modern - must be tested vigorously. If they are found wanting, we need not bother with them. But if they are found to be substantially correct, we may not overlook them.

Author: Norman Lamm

We need to stop the erosion of parental authority.

Author: Sonny Landham

I wasn't good with authority, went to lots of schools, didn't like the fact that there was no autonomy.

Author: Nigella Lawson

Think for yourself and question authority.

Author: Timothy Leary

My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.

Author: Maya Lin

I make no claim to be an authority on writing or illustrating for children.

Author: Hugh Lofting

The State Film Authority will be there for film as industry only, as is the case in all the other states, except Victoria. Victoria is moving more now into supporting non-commercial films.

Author: Ann Macbeth

Authority poisons everybody who takes authority on himself.

Author: Golda Meir

Do I think it's OK to fight authority as long as you're only talking about the high school teacher? No.

Author: John Mellencamp

I'm the guy who wrote The Authority Song. Did they think I was kidding? Did they think it was only a song to entertain?

Author: John Mellencamp

The churches... have lost much of their authority over youth because they have refused to re-examine their religious sanctions and their dogmatic preaching in the light of modern physiology, psychology and sociology.

Author: Agnes Meyer

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Author: Stanley Milgram

I've always had trouble with authority.

Author: John Milius

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

Author: Frederica Montseny

They don't want to be reminded that there is an authority higher than the authority of the state.

Author: Roy Moore

In order to be a lieutenant, you've got to have authority in your voice. No matter how young your face looks, you've got to let your guys know that you're in charge.

Author: Esai Morales

The Supreme Court of the United States is hereby commanded to try Andrew Johnson for usurpation of our Imperial authority and prerogatives, and if found guilty, behead him or send him here to black the Emperor's boots.

Author: Joshua Norton

The more she rejected us the more convinced I was that she was another version of the real Molly, her disdain for authority, her scepticism that she had to do what the white man told her because it was good for her... She is Molly.

Author: Phillip Noyce

Of the sayings of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels that can be compared to those in the fourth Gospel, there are one or two which I venture to think can only have been recorded on the authority of St. John.

Author: Alfred Noyes

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Author: Joyce Oates

Your former Fathers the Spaniards have now no further Authority over you.

Author: Zebulon Pike

The wisest have the most authority.

Author: Plato

Scientists and scholars should constitute themselves as an international NGO of exceptional authority.

Author: John Polanyi

Admittedly, scientific authority is not distributed evenly throughout the body of scientists; some distinguished members of the profession predominate over others of a more junior standing.

Author: Michael Polanyi

I also administer the Internet Assigned Names Authority, which is the central coordinator for the Internet address space, domain names and Internet protocol conventions essential to the use and operation of the Internet.

Author: Jon Postel

In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch that is, who should be listened to and when.

Author: Max Pree

If you're going to kick authority in the teeth, you might as well use two feet.

Author: Keith Richards

In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Author: Tom Robbins

Nearly everywhere monarchs raised themselves further above the level of the greatest nobles and buttressed their new pretensions to respect and authority with cannons and taxation.

Author: J. Roberts

No! on Human Rights and Freedom, on a subject that is as self-evident as that two and two make four, there is no need of any written authority.

Author: Ernestine Rose

In my day, the president ruled with authority before the law, but now all that is lost.

Author: Kim Sam

Israeli Arabs have more political rights than any other Arabs in the Middle East, including their compatriots in the Palestinian Authority.

Author: Jack Schwartz

But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes.

Author: William Seward

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.

Author: Hu Shih

I harbored a lot of resentment as a teenager and as a young adult. I still have a problem with authority, I'm trying to listen!

Author: Nikki Sixx

Moral authority has been laid to rest, world opinion is no more than a game show and the difference between good and evil is about as relevant as changing channels.

Author: Ralph Steadman

The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizen's skin.

Author: Gloria Steinem

Instead, I was interested in what I guess I could call narrative indeterminacy, in questioning the apparent, taken-for-granted authority of any particular representation of the events in question.

Author: Peter Straub

Authority forgets a dying king.

Author: Alfred Tennyson

I'll be on my third honeymoon, so I'm more of an authority than I care to be.

Author: Alan Thicke

The exercise of authority over the same area by two States is a contradiction.

Author: Benjamin Tucker

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

Author: Miguel Unamuno

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

Author: Leonardo Vinci

We have disciplinary authority and will use it when appropriate.

Author: William Webster

The Priestly Code preponderates over the rest of the legislation in force, as well as in bulk; in all matters of primary importance it is the normal and final authority.

Author: Julius Wellhausen

Cameras in classrooms are no substitute for greater authority by parents and teachers.

Author: Paul Weyrich

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Author: Oscar Wilde

That's why editors and publishers will never be obsolete: a reader wants someone with taste and authority to point them in the direction of the good stuff, and to keep the awful stuff away from their door.

Author: Walter Williams

Liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is liberty to that which is good, just, and honest.

Author: John Winthrop

I will not nullify, I will not secede, but I will under sovereign State authority fight in the Union another revolutionary conflict for civil liberty, and a Union which will defend it.

Author: Henry Wise

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

Author: Mary Wollstonecraft

No authority is higher than reality.

Author: Peter Zarlenga