Quotations on Authority

All authority is quite degrading.

~ Oscar Wilde

All authority belongs to the people.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The wisest have the most authority.

~ Plato

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson of statecraft.

~ James Russell Lowell

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

~ Thomas H. Huxley

Who holds a power but newly gained is ever stern of mood.

~ Aeschylus

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

~ Mark Twain

Power takes as ingratitude the writhing of its victims.

~ Rabindranath Tagore

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

~ Carl Sagan

You do not lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

~ Leonardo da Vinci

Nothing is more gratifying to the mind of man than power or dominion.

~ Joseph Addison

If you wish to know what a man is, place him in authority.

~ Proverbs

- Yugoslav Proverb

The highest duty is to respect authority.

~ Leo XIII

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy ax without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.

~ Anne Bradstreet

Authority is no stronger than the man who wields it.

~ Dolores E. McGuire