Alfred de Vigny Quotes

The People adore authority.

My parents made it clear that I should never display even the slightest disrespect to individuals who had the power to let me skip a half grade or move into more challenging classes. While it was all right for me to know more about a topic than my sixth-grade teacher had ever learned, questioning her facts could only lead to trouble.

The people may be made to follow a path of action, but they may not be made to understand it.

A Galileo could no more be elected president of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both high posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of self-illusion.

Everyone follows the chief. This is a very disciplined army we have.

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

As the world leads we follow.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.

Men live in glad obedience to the masters they believe in, or they live in a frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.

We cannot tell some people what it is believe, partly because they are too stupid to understand, partly because we are too proudly vague to explain.

My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it.

The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and common.

Perfect discipline requires recognition of infallibility. Infallibility requires the observance of discipline.

Because I grew up with a drill sergeant in my life, I respect order and it really gave me the discipline to be a leader and not a follower. It also helped me stay out of trouble.

As in the presence of the Master, the Servants are equall, and without any honour at all; So are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign. And though they shine some more, some lesse, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence, they shine no more than the Starres in presence of the Sun.

The masses do not like those who surpass them in any regard. The average man envies and hates those who are different.

The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a common man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.

We must have kings, we must have nobles; nature is always providing such in every society; only let us have the real instead of the titular. In every society some are born to rule, and some to advise. The chief is the chief all the world over, only not his cap and plume. It is only this dislike of the pretender which makes men sometimes unjust to the true and finished man.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

We all have a tendency to want order in our lives. But order presupposes authority, and authority presupposes, sooner or later, that we'll all need hooves. It's going to happen sooner or later, isn't it? You know it is.

The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn-the less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything.

If you want the law to leave you alone, keep your hair trimmed and your boots shined.

God! How men of letters are stupid.

For all people strive to grasp what they do not know, while none strive to grasp what they already know; and all strive to discredit what they do not excel in, while none strive to discredit what they do excel in. This is why there is chaos.

Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make curtsy and say 'Father, as it please you.' But yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fellow, or else make another curtsy and say 'Father, as it please me.