David Douglas Duncan Quotes

Once you have hierarchy you need rules to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules, and you end up with some kind of chain of command or system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.

If an individual is born with the obligation to obey, who is born with the right to command?

Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.

Society receives its momentum from power.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

It is not possible to assume that a world carried on by division of labor and authority, can be governed by universal opinions in the whole population.

A deck of cards is built like the purest of hierarchies, with every card a master to those below it, a lackey to those above it.

Authority is not a quality one person 'has', in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

But I don't write about sex for today's teenagers. Or Doc Martens boots either. I'm more interested in exploring how exactly the world is run, which doesn't really change that much from one generation to another.

Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type.

The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

We are a naturally hierarchical species.

Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence - one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.

If we accept the rule of those who think they are the bosses and lords of Mexico, nothing will change for the people on the bottom.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

Usually, in any revolution people are focused on who wants to have the most power. But the most important thing is the laws that are written during that time.

While one has to work from the roots upwards to build a solid organization, at the start one has no choice but to work from the top downwards, since until individuals had learnt to think for themselves, masses could be manipulated.

Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you.

In Gravity clad, He has nought in his Head, But Visions of Nobles & Kings With Commons below, Who respectfully bow, And worship the dignified Things

Men are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be ruled.

Each age must … contend anew with the question of power and accountability.

The public power of all society is above every soul contained in the same society.

There must in every society be some power or other from which there is no appeal.