Political Authority Quotes

#1. When political authority and journalism colluded with one another, democracy lost its ability to critique and cleanse itself, allowing a deadly infection to take root.

Yoshiki Tanaka

#2. When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.

Michael Ignatieff

#3. The human race will have no respite from evils until those who are really philosophers acquire political power or until, through some divine dispensation, those who rule and have political authority in the cities become real philosophers.

Plato

#4. It's a huge thing when people realize across the culture that paper money is paper. And that there's no fixed value - it's all political. That all value is set by a political authority, basically.

John Currin

#5. The very fact that 'the mystical' is seen as irrelevant to issues of social and political authority itself reflects contemporary, secularized notions of and attitudes toward power. The separation of the mystical from the political is itself a political decision!

Richard King

#6. There is no stopping the world's tendency to throw off imposed restraints, the religious authority that is based on the ignorance of the many, the political authority that is based on the knowledge of the few.

Van Wyck Brooks

#7. Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

Robert O. Paxton

#8. Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable, which gives meaning to the world, and which is the source of all ethical and political authority.

Yuval Noah Harari

#9. When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived.

Robert A. Heinlein

#10. Vox populi vox dei: the voice of the people is the voice of God. The slogan was useful for those who first attempted to substitute the people for God as the source of political authority. Their attempt was ultimately so successful that God no longer seems to be needed in government.

Edmund Morgan

#11. If political authority is not limited, the division of powers, ordinarily the guarantee of freedom, becomes a danger and a scourge.

Benjamin Constant

#12. I think there ought to be a strict separation or wall built between our religious faith and our practice of political authority in office. I don't think the President of the United States should extoll Christianity if he happens to be a Christian at the expense of Judaism, Islam or other faiths.

Jimmy Carter

#13. Novels are political because in them, we try to identify with people who are not like us. And, in that sense, I like the first-person singular because I have to imitate accurately the voice of someone who is not like me. The third-person singular gives me an authority over a character.

Orhan Pamuk

#14. All wars come to an end, at least temporarily. But the authority acquired by the state hangs on; political power never abdicates.

Frank Chodorov

#15. The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.

Felix Frankfurter

#16. I wish to give officials greater discretion. The State's authority will be increased thereby. I wish to transform the non-political criminal police into a political instrument of the highest State authority.

Adolf Hitler

#17. In one sense it is evident that the art of kingship does include the art of lawmaking. But the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art of kingship and has kingly ability.

Plato

#18. Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.

Gary Hamel

#19. Legitimacy is the elixir of political power. "The strongest is never strong enough to be the master", Jean-Jaques Rousseau observed, "unless he translates strength into right and obedience into duty". Only democracy has that authority in the world today.

Fareed Zakaria

#20. Perhaps the challenge is to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against authority.

Stanley Milgram

#21. Israeli Arabs have more political rights than any other Arabs in the Middle East, including their compatriots in the Palestinian Authority.

Jack Schwartz

#22. It will never be possible for any length of time for any group of the American people, either by reason of wealth or learning or inheritance or economic power, to retain any mandate, any permanent authority to arrogate to itself the political control of American public life.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#23. It was a mark of Constantine's political genius and flexibility that he realized it was better to utilize a religion(Christianity) that already had a well-established structure of authority as a prop to the imperial regime rather than exclude it as a hindrance.

Charles Freeman

#24. No settlement with the majority is possible as no Hindu leader speaking with any authority shows any concern or genuine desire for it.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah

#25. Basically, art should remain something that is complex, that has many layers, so there's always a possibility to reconsider things and have a different perspective. It's not just an advertisement with one single message that has some authority, political or not.

Camille Henrot

#26. Here, in the land of happy thoughts, there are no gross injustices, no abuses of authority, no economic and political systems to challenge, and no reason to complain. Here, we are all happy.

Chris Hedges

#27. The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliche, where familiar rhetorical vehicles - decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots - create a ceaseless buzz.

Gary Wolf

#28. It's important for me to not historicize. I work to diffuse the issue of identity and to intensify identification. You have to lose your authority in the making of a film to achieve this. The film is about me being absolutely dislocated. I focus on the very personal to arrive at the very political.

Elia Suleiman

#29. Religions centered on the worship of a male God create "moods" and "motivations" that keep women in a state of psychological dependence on men and male authority, while at the same legitimating the political and social authority of fathers and sons in the institutions of society.

Carol P. Christ

#30. Political correctness is euphemism for "fear to speak truth to authority

Bangambiki Habyarimana

#31. From this brief account of the origins of the English Reformation under Henry VIII, it will be clear that there are reasons for supposing that Henry's agenda was political, dominated by his desire to safeguard his succession and secure his own authority throughout his kingdom. Through

Alister E. McGrath

#32. Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.

Lord Acton

#33. Let the people decide whom to vote for, who has more authority. And only people, only our citizens, are able to place the final emphasis, voting for this or that person or political force, or rejecting it. That's democracy.

Dmitry Medvedev

#34. It may safely be received as an axiom in our political system, that the state governments will in all possible contingencies afford complete security against invasions of the public liberty by the national authority.

Alexander Hamilton

#35. As the histories of ancient and modern democracies illustrate, the pressure of political movement in times of war, civil commotion, or general anxiety pushes in the direction of authority, not away from it.

Robert Heilbroner

#36. I mean to live my life an obedient man, but obedient to God, subservient to the wisdom of my ancestors; never to the authority of political truths arrived at yesterday at the voting booth.

William F. Buckley Jr.

#37. Typical Chilean characteristics, such as sobriety, a horror of ostentation, of standing out over others or attracting attention, generosity, a tendency to compromise rather than confront, a legalistic mentality, respect for authority, resignation to bureaucracy, enthusiasm for political argument,

Isabel Allende

#38. When we speak of power, we mean man's control over the minds and actions of other men. By political power we refer to the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.

Hans J. Morgenthau

#39. The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

Hannah Arendt

#40. Regardless of your race, religion or political affiliation, never hesitate to question those in authority.

Tavis Smiley

#41. Anarchism as a political philosophy seeks to dissolve all forms of authority and power, and if possible, wishes their complete abolition.

Peter Marshall

#42. Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other - unless they are forced to do so by political level authority.

Richard Holbrooke

#43. Exemplary leaders lead by loyalty and not by authority".

Abdulazeez Henry Musa

#44. Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose. It is the dispositional cement that binds men to systems of authority.

Stanley Milgram

#45. Warfare is now an interlocking system of actions - political, economic,
psychological, military - that aims at the overthrow of the established
authority in a country and its replacement by another regime.

Roger Trinquier

#46. Republican theory clearly stated that the people held all political power, and only they could delegate authority to a government. The people were free to change governments at will. They didn't need permission from incumbents.

James D. Best

#47. At bottom, the decision to pardon Nixon was a political judgment properly within the bounds of Ford's constitutional authority. The specter of a former president in the criminal dock as our country moved into its bicentennial year was profoundly disturbing.

Richard Ben-Veniste

#48. No movement finding itself in this stage of struggle can operate by getting authority from the leading body of the political organs for even minor action that is taken and we don't even know in the case of the actions which have publicize whether they are in fact our people.

Joe Slovo

#49. The authorities don't grant concessions out of the kindness of their hearts; they simply concede the reality of what their subjects are strong enough to compel from them. If you want political leverage, don't beg for it, don't seek it through their channels - take power outside them.

CrimethInc.

#50. I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior.

E.B. White

#51. Loyal and substansial Catholic service on the battlefield undermined one of the most longstanding objections to emancipation: namely, that since Catholics owed religious allegiance to a foreign authority in the person of the Pope, their political and patriotic allegiance must necessarily be suspect.

Linda Colley

#52. Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying no to any authority - literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social, and even political.

Ignazio Silone

#53. Autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state.

Theda Skocpol