John Lloyd Quotes

Let us then, dear friends, forever bow down to the general reason of society.

Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.

A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.

The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority.

Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us.

Stripped of ethical rationalizations and philosophical pretensions, a crime is anything that a group in power chooses to prohibit.

I didn't have any concept of age or authority. I remember realising, Oh, the world has rules and we don't.

If a community decides this is how you're going to dress and these are the punishments, who are we to say different?

Like king, like law; like law, like people.

Any fool can make a rule And any fool will mind it.

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

How can we choose to selectively follow what we find comfortable and attack anybody who tries to break free from the norms that we choose to set?

Rules are really weird things, aren't they? I feel like the more I do something, the more I see through rules. I see the reason to ignore it, but at the same time, "That's why they made that rule!"

There are good reasons for being obedient, but being unable to be disobedient is not one of the best reasons.

We live not according to reason, but according to fashion.

There is no reason to accept the doctrines crafted to sustain power and privilege, or to believe that we are constrained by mysterious and unknown social laws.

We are nothing but by the law.

Deviants are sacrificed to increase group solidarity

One day old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had declared that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches. The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren't looking. 'Have faith,' Old Thrashbarg said, 'or burn!' They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed easiest.

And the law, that is the perfection of reason, cannot suffer anything that is inconvenient.

Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate, or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say, the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations. And it is that rule of action, which is prescribed by some superior, and which the inferior is bound to obey.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

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.