Authorities Quotes
More Authorities Quotes
We're agreed that child sexual imagery is a case apart, it's illegal everywhere in the world, there's a consensus on that. It's absolutely right that we identify this stuff, we remove it and we report it to the authorities.
— Peter Barron, one of Google's Communications, quoted on BBC News, "Google and Microsoft agree steps to block abuse images", November 18, 2013.
We need to change the system. We need to overthrow, not the government, as the authorities are always accusing the Communists "of conspiring to teach [us] to do", but this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York.
dorothy day— "On Pilgrimage," Catholic Worker (September 1956)
Unfortunately, catastrophes or scandalous disclosures always have to happen before humanity realises that it is only its own mistakes that have led it into misfortune. These are all the more difficult to rectify, because in the main they have been made by the authorities, who will not commit suicide themselves, but in order to save their own skins, they would rather that all Life should perish before they acknowledge their errors.
viktor schauberger— Viktor Schauberger, 1933 - Implosion Magazine, No. 2, p. 23. (Callum Coats: The Fertile Earth)
Either we, as a society, decide that copyright is the greater value to society, and take active steps to give up private communications as a concept. Either that, or we decide that the ability to communicate in private, without constant monitoring by authorities, has the greater value - in which case copyright will have to give way.
rickard falkvinge— Wikinews Interview (June 20, 2006)
The mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways; it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollowing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still.
julian jaynes— Book II, Chapter 6, p. 313
Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.
timothy leary— How to Operate Your Brain (1994), a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music.
I have read all that has been written by the gravest authorities on political economy on the subject of rent, wages, taxes, tithes.
robert peel— Speech in the House of Commons (15 March 1839).
The object of this volume is not to cast fresh blame on authorities and individuals, nor is it to expose one nation more than another to accusations of deceit.
arthur ponsonby— First lines of the introduction.
We now have a satisfactory solution not only to coalition forces, but also to the Iraqi authorities themselves.
john prescott— Simon Hoggart, "Prescott triumphs on slippery slopes of syntax", 10 June 10, 2004
— Hansard rendered this as "we now have a satisfactory solution for not only coalition forces, but the Iraqi authorities".
This democracy… The elections in Iraq were held despite the American opposition. It was the will of the Iraqi people and the religious authorities. [The elections] were the result of pressure by Ayatollah Sistani, by the Iraqi religious authorities, and by the fighting forces in Iraq on America. They left the US no choice but to allow the elections.
hashemi rafsanjani— Rafsanjani: the U.S. Sold Biological and Chemical Weapons to Saddam Hussein. Elections in Iraq Were Held against America's Will February 2005
In a democratic age, only the behavior of the authorities is subject to public criticism; that of the people themselves, never.
anthony daniels— Who Killed Childhood?
I have no doubt that if an actual ticking bomb situation were to arise, our law enforcement authorities would torture. The real debate is whether such torture should take place outside of our legal system or within it. The answer to this seems clear: If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law.
alan dershowitz— "Is There a Torturous Road to Justice?", The Los Angles Times, 2001-11-08
The more destruction there is everywhere, the more it shows the activity of town authorities.
nikolai vasilievich gogol— Act I, sc. i
The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.
jürgen habermas— p.27 (The structural transformation of the public sphere, 1963/1991)
Upon the best English authorities, yeoman is a title of courtesy.
— Chamberlain, J., Weldon's Case (1795), 26 How. St. Tr. 242.
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
nassim nicholas taleb— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007), p. xxvii, footnote
There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.
— Lewis, Anthony (2007). Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 9780465039173.
— Cited in: Williams, Bill (February 10, 2008). "The majesty of the First Amendment". The Hartford Courant (The Hartford Courant Co.): p. G4; Section: Arts.
The meaning of the First Amendment has been, and will be, shaped by each American generation: by judges, political leaders, citizens. There will always be authorities who try to make their own lives more comfortable by suppressing critical comment.… But I am convinced that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, disturbing speech, is no longer in doubt.
— Lewis, Anthony (2007). Freedom for the Thought That We Hate; A Biography of the First Amendment. Basic Books. p. xv. ISBN 0465039170.
I have often protested against the citation of American authorities.
— Cotton, L.J., id.
I have no power to follow the authorities cited to me from the United States if by so doing I were to contravene the law of England.
— Butt, J., The Avon and Thomas Joliffe (1890), L. R. 1 Pro. Div., p. 8.
I need hardly say that I am always anxious to hear if there be any American decisions bearing upon the question before me, not because they are binding authorities upon me, but in order that I may get the very assistance which I have over and over again derived from the decisions of accomplished Judges, who are dealing with what is very much the same law as our own.
— Brett, L.J., The Queen v. Castro (1880), L. B. 5 Q. B. D. 616.
It is also naïve empiricism to provide, in support of some argument, series of eloquent confirmatory quotes by dead authorities. By searching, you can always find someone who made a well-sounding statement that confirms your point of view and, on every topic, it is possible to find another dead thinker who said the exact opposite.
nassim nicholas taleb— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan (2007), p. xxvii, footnote
Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.
— Frances Wright, in Fanny Wright Unmasked by Her Own Pen, 1850, p.5
In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought; but now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles of morality or of religion, of the existence of authorities, who grow up directly in ideas of negation in everything, that is to say, savages.
— Leo Tolstoy, Professor Golenishtchev in Anna Karenina, C. Garnett, trans. (New York: 2003), Part 5, Chapter 9, p. 434
No open resistance, no organization in opposition to the federal authorities, nothing but the act of a few men who fled to escape being forced into the army &mdash and this is the history of the 'Fishing Creek Confederacy'
— Charles R. Buckalew as quoted in The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance
There was no occupation. There were agreements at the time with the legitimately elected authorities in the Baltic countries.
— Kremlin's European affairs chief Sergei Yastrzhembsky
I am continually amused by the Communist argument that the United States tries to prevent the less-developed countries from industrializing in order to keep them subservient to herself. In our extended dealings with the American aid authorities, we have never found this to be the case; on the contrary, they have helped us with a wide variety of industrial projects, including those that compete directly with American industries. The Americans have enough sense to prefer strong and prosperous friends, and they realize that their most lucrative international trade is with other highly industrialized countries, not with weak and backward ones.
— Pahlavi, Muhammad Reza (1961) Mission for my Country, London, page 301
This is the first time authorities helped me escape prison.
— Who: George Sitts, convicted murderer before his electrocution in 1947 in South Dakota
