Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [141-160] of 260 Authority quotesAuthority QuotesAuthority Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think.~ H. L. Mencken The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol at his head. Put it in his hand and it's good-bye to the Bill of Rights.~ H. L. Mencken The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.~ H. L. Mencken I did not come here to guide lambs. I came here to awaken lions.~ Javier Milei Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind.~ Henry Miller What we have to remember is that not everything is under our control. If people are free in any meaningful sense of the word, that means they are at liberty to foul up their lives as much as make something grand of them. That's a gamble we all take. That's the risk of liberty. Nobody wants others to screw up their lives, but each must be free to do so for themselves.~ Joel Miller Far from a simple attempt to rid the nation of crime and drugs, our policy against narcotics -- like any public policy -- comes with strings attached. And increasingly these strings are constricting around the necks of Americans' lives and liberties.~ Joel Miller We should...be able to see that our interest would be best served not by asking the state to promulgate our values but by forbidding the state to promulgate any values at all. If the state can espouse some value that we love, it can, with equal justice, espouse others we do not love.~ Richard Mitchell Given that the nineteenth century was the century of Socialism, Liberalism, and Democracy, it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains; and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism. For if the nineteenth century was the century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State. It is a perfectly logical deduction that a new doctrine can utilize all the still vital elements of previous doctrines.~ Benito Mussolini The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience.~ National Education Association Resolution Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.~ Friedrich Nietzsche What gives the new despotism its peculiar effectiveness is indeed its liaison with humanitarianism, but beyond this fact its capacity for entering into the smallest details of human life.~ Robert Nisbet Very commonly in ages when civil rights of one kind are in evidence – those pertaining to freedom of speech and thought in, say, theater, press, and forum, with obscenity and libel laws correspondingly loosened – very real constrictions of individual liberty take place in other, more vital areas: political organization, voluntary association, property, and the right to hold jobs, for example.~ Robert Nisbet The State, both in its genesis and by its primary intention, is purely anti-social. It is not based on the idea of natural rights, but on the idea that the individual has no rights except those that the State may provisionally grant him. It has always made justice costly and difficult of access, and has invariably held itself above justice and common morality whenever it could advantage itself by so doing.~ Albert Jay Nock Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.~ P. J. O'Rourke Authority has always attracted the lowest elements in the human race. All through history, mankind has been bullied by scum. Those who lord it over their fellows and toss commands in every direction and would boss the grass in the meadow about which way to bend in the wind are the most depraved kind of prostitutes. They will submit to any indignity, perform any vile act, do anything to achieve power. The worst off-sloughings of the planet are the ingredients of sovereignty. Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy the whores are us.~ P. J. O'Rourke This is the gravest danger that today threatens civilization: State intervention, the absorption of all spontaneous social effort by the State; that is to say, of spontaneous historical action, which in the long-run sustains, nourishes and impels human destinies.~ José Ortega y Gasset At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to state this or that or the other, but it is “not done”… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.~ George Orwell Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.~ George Orwell If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.~ George Orwell Previous 20 quotes Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print