Authority Influence Quotes

The emphasis on sorcery reflected accusations by the authorities more than it did actual practice. Being threatened, the Church responded by virulent persecution.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Power says if you are a committee chairman, your idea is good only because you have got power.

Naturally the common people don't want war. . . but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along. . .

Those fields which most depend upon authoritative opinion for their data least contain known natural law.

Since the discovery of printing, knowledge has been called to power, and power has been used to make knowledge a slave.

The basic ingredients of psychotherapy are religion, rhetoric, and repression, which are themselves mutually overlapping categories.

The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn.

Kant thought things, not because they were true, but because he was Kant.

As a little boy of eleven I entered the Cadet Corps. I was not particularly eager to become a Cadet, but my father wished it. So my wishes were not consulted.

Sit, Phantom!" Ivy cooed. "On your bottom!" "Oh, for goodness' sake!" Gabriel put down his book and pointed a longer finger at Phantom. "Sit," he commanded in a deep voice. Phantom looked sheepish and sank straight to the floor. Ivy scowled in frustration. "I've been trying to get him to do that all day! What is it with dogs and male authority?

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.

If the official is himself upright, the people will play their roles without orders. If he is not upright, even under orders the people will be disobedient.

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

Journalists follow authority as sharks follow a liner, dining on the scraps that are thrown overboard.

Democracy means doing whatever you want without asking permission of anybody but your boss, your doctor, your lawyer, your landlord, your bank, your city, your state and federal authorities, and your wife and children.

I do get stopped in the street, and people are always, without exception, really polite. I think it's because they think I can send them to prison.

Bureaucracies have a natural tendency not to cooperate, coordinate or consolidate with each other. They won't cooperate with each other - unless they are forced to do so by political level authority.

Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.

But I know I have a son who doesn't listen to anything I say and if he hears the same thing from someone else, sometimes it has a little more impact.

Therefore, I feel convinced that any political picture can be changed to suit the needs of the powers that be.

You cannot be an educator or a teacher without relating to children with full insight. Their urge to imitate has been transformed into a receptivity based on a natural and uncontested relationship of authority, and you must take this into account in the broadest possible sense.

It is completely in accord with the etatist thinking prevalent everywhere today to consider a theory to be finally disposed of merely because the authorities who control appointments to academic positions, want to know nothing of it, and to see the criterion of truth in the approval of a government office.

Parents, teachers, clergy and physicians change lives with their words. It is hypnotic for a child or patient to hear an authority figure's words. As I am always sharing, 'wordswordswords' can become 'swordswordswords,' and we can kill or cure with either words or swords.