Traditional Authority Quotes

Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone.

The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.

Why will we be imposed on by antiquity?

The chiefs of Fiji have relevance for all our citizens not just the Fijians, they still represent stability, order and continuity. If the chiefs were diminished, the entire nation would be weakened and be vulnerable.

Every tradition grows continually more venerable, and the more remote its origins, the more this is lost sight of. The veneration paid the tradition accumulates from generation to generation, until it at last becomes holy and excites awe.

Man must not check his reason by tradition, but, contrariwise, must check tradition by reason.

In Afghanistan, legitimate authority has been traditionally highly localized, a product of consensus rather than brute force, and firmly anchored in tribal, clannish, and kinship structures.

Political authority is problematic in Africa because of the blurry dividing line between the public and the private realm. Formal rules matter less than a series of informal institutions that regulate politics.

We find—in the case of political affairs—that the most servile submission to privileged classes, and the grossest abuses of power by these, have been the precursors of the wildest ebullitions of popular fury,—of the overthrow indiscriminately of ancient institutions, good and bad.

Part of the issue around communal land, which became a matter of controversy, is that we are saying that this land must go back to communities. Not chiefs and traditional leaders.

Custom, that unwritten law, By which the people keep even kings in awe.

The Senate is the last primitive society in the world. We still worship the elders of the tribe and honor the territorial imperative.

Our people love and understand authority better than law. They consider a military chief more accessible than an article of a legal code.

While our traditional authority has always been respected, sadly at times, it has also been abused.

We must see with our own eyes and not accept any laid-down tradition as if it had some magical power in it.

For centuries we have been living in the society where not laws but people ruled, where there was no legal state.

The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

In Spain the king rules, but in the Sierra I do.

Confucius was not so much a philsopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.

Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.

Governments can derive their authority from three sources: tradition, the qualities and charisma of an individual leader, and constitutional and legal norms.

I love man-kind, but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind. Men execute nothing so faithfully as the wills of the dead, to the last codicil and letter. They rule this world, and the living are but their executors. Such foundation too have our lectures and our sermons, commonly.

I think people have to recognise that the traditional modes of authority weren't that great.

The Elders were closer to the Maker of All Things and should be deferred to whenever they made their will known.

That past which is so presumptuously brought forward as a precedent for the present, was itself founded on some past that went before it.