Quotes about Authority

No member of a society has a right to teach any doctrine contrary to what the society holds to be true.

If anyone makes himself his own master in the spiritual life, he makes himself scholar to a fool.

...the need to overawe people and demand obedience from them is powerful and seductive. It is a part of that world that the kingdom of heaven is not of.

I was made acutely aware how far superior an education that stresses independent action and personal responsibility is to one that relies on drill, external authority and ambition.

Autoritätsdusel ist der größte Feind der Wahrheit. / Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

Are you sure?" asked the Savage. "Are you quite sure that the Edmund in that pneumatic chair hasn't been just as heavily punished as the Edmund who's wounded and bleeding to death?

Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up of historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years' War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 150.

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude

Vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.

The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not "what it means to