Quotes about Authority

Those despotic governments which are founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of religion.

The only liberty that is valuable is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but which cannot exist at all without them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in its substance and vital principle.

The very idea of the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and horror.

The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are both to be reckoned among their rights.

Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep,—to encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of untried policy,—to neglect those provisions, preparations, and precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted into its poison.

There is no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.

You will either fear God or other people. There are no other alternatives.

God's self-revelation is a higher authority than our feelings.

Life in the kingdom isn't easy, at least not when we want to share the throne.

Where everyone is responsible, no one is really responsible.

Every revolutionary ends as an oppressor or a heretic.

All modern revolutions have ended in a reinforcement of the State.