Authority Source Quotes

For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.

The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.

I created no authority that wasn't already there under the constitution.

He that is for a government of laws is for the government of God. And he that is for a government of man is for government of a beast.

All power is lodged in, and consequently derived from, the people. We should wear it as a breastplate, and buckle it on as our armour.

ALL lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. Power in the people is like light in the sun, native, original, inherent and unlimited by any thing human.

A government which results from election is more divine than one which results from succession.

The judge's authority depends upon the assumption that he speaks with the mouth of others. That is to say, the momentum of his utterances must be greater than any which his personal reputation and character can command, if it is to do the work assigned to it - if it is to stand against the passionate resentments arising out of the interests he must frustrate - for while a judge must discover some composition with the dominant trends of his times, he must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past.

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing.

What gives the Word of God authority is simply the fact that it is the word of God!

The book, called the Bible, is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice!

The doctrine of Scripture teaches us about the authority of God's Word. Scripture must be the final rule of faith and practice for our lives. Not our feelings or emotions. Not signs or prophetic words or hunches.

God is the foundation of all authority, He exercises that foundation because He is the author and the owner of His creation. He is the foundation upon which all other authority stands or falls.

And where else will [Hume,] this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society? Will it be in the minority? Or in an individual of that minority?

Governments arise either out of the people or over the people.

First of all, the evangelical is one who is entirely subservient to the Bible. This is true of every evangelical. He is a man of one book; he starts with it; he submits himself to it; this is his authority.

Let this stand then as a settled maxim of the law of nature, never to be shaken by any artifices of flatterers, that the senate, or the people, are superior to kings, be they good or bad: which is but what you yourself do in effect confess when you tell us that the authority of kings was derived from the people. For that power which they transferred to princes doth yet naturally, or, as I may say, virtually, reside in themselves notwithstanding.

The sovereign power of all civil authority is founded in the consent of the people.

What is the government? Nothing, unless supported by opinion.

Death is the sanction of everything the story-teller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.

All lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own.

We derive our authority from God and the West India Company, not from the pleasure of a few ignorant subjects.

All authority must be out of a man's self, turned . . . either upon an art, or upon a man.

The laws receive their force and authority from an oath of fidelity, either tacit or expressed, which living subjects have sworn to their sovereign, in order to restrain the intestine fermentation of the private interest of individuals.