Unjust Authority Quotes

… to gag us from speaking truth, and discovering the tyrannies of bad men.

’Tis the time’s plague when madmen lead the blind.

There is no greater mindlessness and absurdity than to force conscience and the spirit with external power.

Those who have the power and should be the most responsible are often the least responsible.

Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it. In other words, we are all—-though naturally to differing extents-—responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery. None of us is just its victim. We are all also its co-creators.

Coalitions are but the unjust subjection of one people to another.

Religion is a means of exploitation employed by the strong against the weak; religion is a cloak of ambition, injustice and vice.

If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit' which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lent its support.

We are now an occupied territory. Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in these unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls.

Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty.

Nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far, and relaxed too much.

It was intended as a bill of coercion, to oblige the people of New England to submit to the just power of the mother country.

Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is.

John Adams is a repulsive pedant, a gross hypocrite and an unprincipled oppressor…. The Adams administration is a continual tempest of malignant passions.

We have been told that…Britain is the mother and we are the children, that a filial duty and submission is due from us to her and that we ought to doubt our own judgment and presume that she is right, even when she seems to us to shake the foundations of government. But admitting we are children, have not children a right to complain when their parents are attempting to break their limbs, to administer poison, or to sell them to enemies for slaves?

I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality.

Silence coerced by law—the argument of force in its worst form.

A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets.

Dominion by land or sea will appear equally destitute of attraction, when it comes to be generally understood, that all its advantages rest with the rulers, and that the subjects at large derive no benefit whatever.

The great mass of 18-year olds ... are given no choice.... The older generation immolates the younger, on the alter of Moloch ]. What God, centuries ago, forbade Abraham to do even to his own son,—"Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou anything unto him" [Genesis 22:12]—this we do by decree to the entire youth of a nation.

I'm not going to be bullied by an overzealous agency of the United States government.

I don't respond to authority figures who abuse their authority.

And who can doubt that it will lead to the worst disorders when minds created free by God are compelled to submit slavishly to an outside will? When we are told to deny our senses and subject them to the whim of others? When people devoid of whatsoever competence are made judges over experts and are granted authority to treat them as they please? These are the novelties which are apt to bring about the ruin of commonwealths and the subversion of the state.