Quotes about Authority

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.

Compassion must become the core and even the nature of authority. When the Christian leader is a man of God for the future generation, he can be so only insofar as he is able to make the compassion of God with man—which is visible in Jesus Christ—credible in his own world.

The gospel proclaims human freedom and dignity more than human enslavement and depravity. What is needed is a balance of biblical values and emphasis on the empowering quality of the gospel. The spiritual values of humility, long suffering, endurance, and obedience are to be affirmed alongside self-reliance, freedom, proclamation, mission, and authority.

We need you to be a father who can claim for himself the authority of true compassion.

As Father, the only authority he claims for himself is the authority of compassion.

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion.

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.

When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his office, then the revolution is accomplished.

The only government that I recognize,—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army,—is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!