Quotes with authority

The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.

No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority.

The man whose authority is recent is always stern.

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.

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.

America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.

To say that authority, whether secular or religious, supplies no ground for morality is not to deny the obvious fact that it supplies a sanction.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

Nothing destroys authority more than the unequal and untimely interchange of power stretched too far and relaxed too much.

Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker.