"Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much."
Authority quotes
Authority
479 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Authority quotes (page 4 of 24)
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"Historically, America has answered to a higher authority."
"The actions of those in power can have enormous consequences - a price that they themselves almost never have to pay."
"Convention is the ruler of all."
"It is my fate to be considered an authority, since I spent my youth rebelling against it."
"Well, I must be patient; there is no fettering of authority."
"Shall remain! Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you His absolute 'shall'?"
"Insurgent, he says. Noun. A person who acts in opposition to the established authority, who is not necessarily regarded as a belligerent."
"Lawful and settled authority is very seldom resisted when it is well employed."
"It is almost always the unhappiness of a victorious disputant to destroy his own authority by claiming too many consequences, or diffusing his proposition to an indefensible extent."
"In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable."
"There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad."
"Ten thousand things there are which we believe merely upon the authority or credit of those who have spoken or written them."
"The authorities liked to say that we received a balanced diet; it was indeed balanced - between the unpalatable and the inedible."
"The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas."
"In any close society it is more urgent to restrain others than to be free oneself. Hence the tendency for the central authority to absorb and supersede such as are local or delegated."
"Universities are less constrained by authority and rigid doctrine in the United States than in most other societies, to my knowledge."
"Honor is a harder master than the law."
"If authorities were well organized, there would not be an Unknown Warrior."
"What is held by the whole Church, and that not as instituted by Councils, but as a matter of invariable custom, is rightly held to have been handed down by authority."