Authority Critique Quotes

Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.

Mockery of religion is one of the most essential things... one of the beginnings of human emancipation is the ability to laugh at authority.

One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'

I don't understand why the police are infallible. They remind me a lot of the Catholic Church.

Most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong.

Culturally, I have always been part of the proletariat. I lived side by side with the sons of glassblowers, fishermen and smugglers. The stories they told were shaper satires about the hypocrisy of authority and the middle classes, the two-facedness of teachers and lawyers and politicians. I was born politicized.

The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.

As a result of my study, I came to the conclusion that a common supreme authority was undesirable.

The least one can say of power is that a vocation for it is suspicious.

The time-honored role of the artist [is] to speak truth to power.

She had got to the bottom of this business of democratic government and found out that it was nothing more than government of any other kind.

There is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Authority figures are so irritating. Because they always tell you to do things for reasons that aren't very good. That sums up what authority is about for me.

The law is an expression of God 's holy will and as such must be honored and loved," said the preacher piously. "Rubbish," said the Master. "The law is a necessary evil and as such must be cut down to the barest minimum. Show me a lover of the law and I will show you a muttonheaded tyrant .

The words were a paraphrase of the suggestion of Jesus: "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's." Bokonon's paraphrase was this: "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on.

If you don't question the officials' role then you've got to ask what they are doing

Why is it that the king can do no wrong? This shows they do not regard the king as being a human. But the king can do wrong.

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive.

Government isn't a religion. It shouldn't be treated as such. It's not God; it's humans, fallible people, feathering their nests most of the time.

We do not believe in the infallibility, nor even in the general goodness of the masses; on the contrary. But we believe even less in the infallibility and goodness of those who seize power and legislate.

Whoever established the high road, and how high it should be, should be fired.

The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.

My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.