Top 1200 Authority Figures Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

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Last updated on April 22, 2025.
It takes spiritual authority to bless others. Many Christians say, "God bless you," but one clearly senses that although the words express a kind wish, they lack real spiritual authority.
We do not believe that if you cut back what government does you diminish its authority. On the contrary, a government that did less, and therefore did better, would strengthen its authority.
We hear from sex workers who have through their own volition become media figures, or have despite their own wishes become media figures. Like Ashley Dupré, who has a sex advice column in the New York Post. You get outed and then people expect you to write a memoir because they think, what else are you going to do with your life?
What many students most want from college, although they would never admit it, is an authority structure. There is a demand for an authority which they can then reject; they want to be told what to do, so they can disobey. It is a textbook case of bad faith, a flight from freedom.
If you don't like the word 'religion,' you can replace it with 'ideology' - it's largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority and where authority is coming from.
The government believed that adherence to authority was human nature, so the Gezi protests were a real surprise to them. After the initial moment of shock, they decided to severely punish those participating in what they called an act of disobedience to authority.
The script for this film was written 52 years ago by Edward R. Murrow, who taught us many valuable lessons about responsibility and always, always questioned authority, because without it authority often goes unchecked.
Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed
You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it.
If you compare Russia and America, they are two different worlds. People, cars, clothes. Girls' figures. Especially girls' figures. Why do you think that is, that when an American goes to Russia for a week, he stays for two extra weeks? Girls! And when a Russian goes to America for a week, he leaves in five days. I'm serious!
For all the textbook reasons - any individual's reading of a photograph is preceded by the evidential authority of the medium. You have the literalness of a glass on a table - and at the same time of that evidential authority that you can't get around, there is the possibility of universalizing the subject - of getting the whole world into the picture.
Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control. And it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realized that you either became a power or you were crushed.
We have one authority and one law and everyone has the responsibility to follow that law and that authority. — © Mahmoud Abbas
We have one authority and one law and everyone has the responsibility to follow that law and that authority.
Real spiritual authority has to do with the truth of the actual words being spoken, and the spirit of the person behind the words. Really, authority is about truth: honest-living truth.
By learning to yield to the loving authority of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life — his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers.
Questioning authority can hardly be called our national pastime. We even make a philosophy out of fear. Fatalism, destiny, karma... are the favourite cultural holes we hide in when authority flogs us. And what's our tragedy.
I do not espouse the unitarian position. President Clinton's assertion of directive authority over administration, more than President Reagan's assertion of a general supervisory authority, raises serious constitutional questions.
When your family is twice as weird as normal, you have to be twice as polite to authority, because authority hates weird.
When a new idea assaults the power of established authority, authority always screams out that morality has been affronted. It makes no difference if this idea is that the world is round or that women should vote or that the workers should control industry.
Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism. Will it not lead to a revolution? Indeed, it will. No real social change has ever come without a revolution. People are either not familiar with their history, or they have not yet learned that revolution is but thought carried into action.
An established government has an infinite advantage, by that very circumstance of its being established--the bulk of mankind being governed by authority, not reason, and never attributing authority to anything that has not the recommendation of antiquity.
Taking legislative authority away from the federal government doesn't necessarily mean freer individuals. It might just mean granting vastly more authority to the states--which already have far broader police powers than most of us would care to admit.
As a foreign minister, I have to respect the authority to look after the best interest of the child is, as always, in my country like in India, with the parents and the family. But in extreme cases, the situation is open for the child protection authority to intervene.
In a long distance race, everyone gets tired. The winner is the runner who figures out where to put the tired, figures out how to store it away until after the race is over. Sure, he's tired. Everyone is. That's not the point. The point is to run.
Women, more than men, are bound by tradition and authority. What the father, the brother, the doctor, and the minister have said has been received undoubtingly. Until women throw off this reverence for authority they will not develop.
Receiving the authority of the priesthood by the laying on of hands is an important beginning, but it is not enough. Ordination confers authority, but righteousness is required to act with power as we strive to lift souls, to teach and testify, to bless and counsel, and to advance the work of salvation.
The romantic temper, so often and so grievously misinterpreted and not more by others than by its own, is an insecure, unsatisfied, and impatient temper which sees no fit abode here for its ideals and chooses therefore to behold them under insensible figures. As a result of this choice it comes to disregard certain limitations. Its figures are blown to wild adventures, lacking the gravity of solid bodies, and the mind that has conceived them ends by disowning them.
Perhaps nothing in our society is more needed for those in positions of authority than accountability. Too often those with authority are able (and willing) to surround themselves with people who support their decisions without question.
Men are rapists, batterers, plunderers, killers; these same men are religious prophets, poets, heroes, figures of romance, adventure, accomplishment, figures ennobled by tragedy and defeat. Men have claimed the earth, called it 'Her'. Men ruin Her. Men have airplanes, guns, bombs, poisonous gases, weapons so perverse and deadly that they defy any authentically human imagination.
The issue is whether the ultimate civil authority of the United States can tolerate actions in contempt of constitutional lines of authority. Any lessening of civil power over military power must inevitably lead away from democracy.
The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth will then become a consensus-truth accepted by many individuals unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth promulgated by the propaganda system - however irrational - stands a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem self-evident common sense.
I think that Canadians have an incredible reverence for authority and regard for authority, and I think one of the healthy ways that it's challenged is through questioning it, through the polite hostility of comedy.
Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them.
The modern world detests authority but worships relevance. Our Christian conviction is that the Bible has both authority and relevance, and that the secret of both is Jesus Christ
As a preacher who is fully human, and clearly not divine, I can't speak as Jesus did. But I do seek to speak truth that carries weight and authority. All of us who preach the gospel aspire to speak under the authority of Jesus.
If you see someone taking responsibility, give that person authority. If you see someone looking for authority, watch out!
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
We really should stop taking historical novelists seriously as historians. The idea that they have authority is ludicrous. They are very good at imagining character: that's why the novels sell. They have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources. Full stop.
I don't like authority, at least I don't like other people's authority.
Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.
When an individual wishes to stand in opposition to authority, he does best to find support for his position from others in his group. The mutual support provided by men for each other is the strongest bulwark we have against the excesses of authority.
If you find from your own experience that something is a fact and it contradicts what some authority has written down, then you must abandon the authority and base your reasoning on your own findings.
We've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.
The reason why the simpler sort are moved with authority, is the consciousness of their own ignorance; whereby it cometh to pass that having learned men in admiration, they rather fear to dislike them than know wherefore they should allow and follow their judgments. Contrariwise with them that are skilful authority is much more strong and forcible; because they only are able to discern how just cause there is why to some men's authority so much should be attributed.
Priesthood is the means whereby the Lord acts through men to save souls. One of the defining features of the Church of Jesus Christ, both anciently and today, is His authority. There can be no true Church without divine authority.
I'm really a nightmare for the fashion designer because I take away all of his authority, and I become the authority, and I turn him into my assistant. You could say I intervene, and I intervene in a very determining way in all the aspects that have to do with the visual construction of the film.
Our parents, our tribesman, our authority figures, clearly expect us to be bad or anti-social or greedy or selfish or dirty or destructive or self-destructive. Our social nature is such that we tend to meet the expectations of our elders. Whenever this reversal took place and our elders stopped expecting us to be social and expected us to be anti-social, just to put it in gross terms, that's when the real fall took place. And we're paying for it dearly.
The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.
I myself, a professional mathematician, on re-reading my own work find it strains my mental powers to recall to mind from the figures the meanings of the demonstrations, meanings which I myself originally put into the figures and the text from my mind. But when I attempt to remedy the obscurity of the material by putting in extra words, I see myself falling into the opposite fault of becoming chatty in something mathematical.
I obviously identify with the anti-authority figure. I've pretty much always had problems with authority, ever since I was a kid. But, yeah, it's not identifying, I think it's more a part of my natural DNA that I question anybody who has a plan. Everybody's got to have an angle; that's the way I grew up.
Influence is not the same as authority. Authority can be abused by influence gives. — © Johnny Hunt
Influence is not the same as authority. Authority can be abused by influence gives.
It seems that the rebels found the chaos of transition more difficult to accept than the tyranny they had known before. They joyfully welcomed back authority-even oppressive authority-for it was less painful for them than uncertainty.
We're going to protect and honor the Constitution, and I don't have the authority to set it aside.... If I had the authority to set it aside, this would be a dangerous government, and I wouldn't respect it.
Hopefully that will be seen as a response, a leadership responding to an issue and therefore one's authority, while it's not as high if you didn't have the problem, it does mean that people say 'well he used his authority to come up with a solution in double-quick time that met with broader public acceptance.'
The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that book may be assessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.
I feel like because I've done more gay characters, gay scenes, or gay projects than most straight actors, people see it as some sort of mission. It's more of a case-by-case basis, and just trying to capture figures that I love. I guess that a lot of the figures that I love were gay.
You are your own highest authority. Do not place your source of authority outside of you. Go within to see if the truth you've found is in harmony with the truth you find in your heart.
That's the thing about independently minded children. You bring them up teaching them to question authority, and you forget that the very first authority they question is you.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
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