#authority

The lesson I learned is that when you give someone authority, you must be conscious you are doing so and continue to ask yourself whether it is in your best interests. ↗

— Margie Warrell

#self-interest #courage

To me it seems that too many young women of this time share the same creed. 'Live, laugh, love, be nothing but happy, experience everything, et cetera et cetera.' How monotonous, how useless this becomes. What about the honors of Joan of Arc, Beauvoir, Stowe, Xena, Princess Leia, or women that would truly fight for something other than just their own emotions? ↗

— Criss Jami

#beauvoir #emotion #et-cetera #etc #etcetera

If you want to check someone's principles, give him authority .. Then have a seat & watch ↗

— أحمد عمارة

#life-lessons #principles #life

Prophets borrow the omniscience of God to speak with the insolence of angels. But we are only impressed with their authority when they talk to us humbly, as men of inferior rank. ↗

— Bauvard

#authority #god #prophets #men

When a man has a gift in speaking the truth, brute aggression is no longer his security blanket for approval. He, on the contrary, spends most of his energy trying to tone it down because his very nature is already offensive enough. ↗

— Criss Jami

#approval #authority #blanket #brute-force #brutes

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#conformity #fool #foolishness #law #rule

I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#contrarianism #dissent #dissidents #free-thought #harold-rosenberg

My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave. ↗

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

#authority #behave #how #i #need

I have very little hope that any permission can be gained for your organization. However, I shall place it in a special folder with similar applications and raise the question from time to time with such people here as may have authority. ↗

— Anna Louise Strong

#applications #authority #from time to time #gained #here

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice. ↗

— Nadine Gordimer

#like #moral #moral authority #sacrifice