Wisdom Quotations

Authority

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn:
You can have power over people as long as you don't take everything away from them. But when you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power.

Carl Sagan:
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Cyrus Curtis:
There are two kinds of people who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.

Dwight D. Eisenhower:
You do not lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.

HH the Dalai Lama:
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Henry Steele Commager:
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.

James Russell Lowell:
He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.

Kenneth Blanchard:
The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.

Leonard H. Robbins:
How a minority,
Reaching majority,
Seizing authority,
Hates a minority!

Leonardo da Vinci:
Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

Mark Twain:
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Autobiography, 1959

Mark Twain:
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

Molly Ivins:
What you need is sustained outrage...there's far too much unthinking respect given to authority.

Rabindranath Tagore:
Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

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