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"It's a mysterious quality, hard to define, but we always know it when we see it, even as kids. You can probably remember seeing it in certain really great coaches, or teachers, or some extremely cool older kid you 'looked up to' (interesting phrase) and wanted to be just like. Some of us remember seeing the quality as kids in a minister or rabbi, or a scoutmaster, or a parent, or a friend's parent, or a supervisor in a summer job. And yes, all these are 'authority figures,' but it's a special kind of authority. If you've ever spent time in the military, you know how incredibly easy it is to tell which of your superiors are real leaders and which aren't, and how little rank has to do with it. A leader's real 'authority' is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right. Deep down, you almost always like how a real leader makes you feel, the way you find yourself working harder and pushing yourself and thinking in ways you couldn't ever get to on your own." David Foster Wallace   "Only rarely do statutes offer reasons to justify their prescriptions, and then usually out of concern about potential interpretive problems in difficult cases. Typically, drafters of statutes, like sergeants and parents, simply do not see the need to give reasons, and often see a strong need not to: The act of giving a reason is the antithesis of authority. When the voice of authority fails, the voice of reason emerges. Or vice versa. But whatever the hierarchy between reason and authority, reasons are what we typically give to support what we conclude precisely when the mere fact that we have concluded is not enough. And reasons are what we typically avoid when the assertion of authority is thought independently important." Frederick Schauer   "If there is not a recognized authority or convention, how can there be the occasional eruption of revolt and liberation that both the creative impulse and free mind require? Apart from authority there can be no really vital social relationship in society; this is as true in the family as it is in the university or the church. It is power, not authority, that seeks homogeneity, regimentation, and the manipulated articulation of parts by hierarchies of administrators. And it is the competition of authorities within society at large that, above most things I can think of, keeps a society mobile and free. 'Multiply your associations and be free,' wrote the great Proudhon." Robert Nisbet   "Neither 'available' resources nor the 'existing' needs are objective facts in the sense of those which the engineer deals in his limited field: they can never be directly known in all relevant detail to a single planning body. Resources and needs exist for practical purposes only through somebody knowing about them, and there will always be infinitely more known to all the people together than can be known to the most competent authority. A successful solution can therefore not be based on the authority dealing directly with the objective facts, but must be based on a method of utilising the knowledge dispersed among all members of society, knowledge of which in any particular instance the central authority will usually know neither who possesses it nor whether it exists at all." Friedrich Hayek   "What do I see around me? Religious troubles, civil dissensions, the consternation of some, the audacity and uncontrollable fury of others, a government that is the slave of popular tyranny, the sanctuary of the laws surrounded by unruly men, who alternately want to dictate or disobey them; soldiers without discipline, leaders without authority, magistrates without courage, ministers without means, a king, the foremost friend of his people, plunged into bitterness, outraged, threatened, despoiled of all authority, and the public power no longer existing except in the clubs, where gross and ignorant men dare to make pronouncements on all political questions." Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal   "To take away freedom is to take away humanness. A society in which the individual is beset by ranks of nannies, secret policemen and a hundred kinds of authority joined together to make you behave in the way you would, according to authority, voluntarily behave if only you weren't so misguided and ignorant, is, the Romantics insisted, a deeply immoral society." Tom Stoppard   "Two centuries later, our economic power and military might have grown beyond anything that our forefathers could have imagined. But that power and might can only be sustained and renewed if we can regain our authority with the world, the authority not simply of a large and wealthy nation but of the American idea. If we can live up to that idea, if we can exercise our power wisely and well, we can make America great again." Hillary Clinton   "If men did but consider what infinite variety of religions have prevailed and do now prevail in the world; what variety of notions and practices have prevailed and do prevail in the same country; what revolutions of opinions there have been among Christians, and how greatly divided they have always been and now are in sentiment, and how much departed every sect thereof is from their primitive institution; what a small part of the world is possessed by Christians, and how very inconsiderable a part is possessed by any one set of Christians, and what little figure the church of England (whose members are infinitely divided in sentiment from one another) makes upon the globe; what monstrous absurdities prevail in most places, and what excessive ignorance every where; and how this state of things has endured among men, who have been and are chiefly conducted by authority and compelled by force; it should seem that authority and force are so far from being the way to put an end to error or make men wiser that they have contributed to increase the errors and follies of men." Anthony Collins   "The coercion which dominates agrarian society requires cohesion, which in turn depends on principles of legitimacy for its operation—you need to know whom to gang up with. Coercion operates best if the gangs of coercers are well defined and cohesive, and if their internal authority structure is clear. The ritual and doctrinal maintenance of these principles of legitimacy of membership and leadership also require specialists—namely, priests or clerics of one kind or another—and in this manner, the Black tend to share power and authority with the Red in the agrarian world. The social philosophy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment consisted, basically, of a repudiation of this world: notoriously, its ambition was to see the last king throttled with the entrails of the last priest. The Enlightenment correctly characterised the basic features of the world it was rejecting; it was mistaken in thinking that world, and the oppression and superstition it lived by, to be simply the fruit of human stupidity, of lack of 'Enlightenment.' The strangling of monarchs with the guts of clerics, attractive though the picture may be, would not on its own terminate the agrarian world and its system of values and illusions. That system is rooted in the logic of the agrarian world, and not in human stupidity, or at least not in stupidity alone." Ernest Gellner   "The war has not gone well, and increasingly in an almost primitive reaction to which modern societies are as much exposed as any Stone Age clan it has been judged that this is because the gods are against it. In modern parlance this means that the evil military industrial complex has embarked on a racist colonialist adventure. (I have heard the head of SNCC state that we were in Vietnam 'for the rice supplies.') But the essential point is that we have been losing a war, and this more than any single thing erodes the authority of a government, however stable, just, well-intentioned or whatever. I would imagine that the desire not to be the first President to 'lose' a war has been much in President Johnson's mind over the past years, and explains some of his conduct. But the fact is that he could not win, and the all-important accompanying fact is that the semi-violent domestic protest that arose in consequence forced him to resign. In a sense he was the first American President to be toppled by a mob. No matter that it was a mob of college professors, millionaires, flower children, and Radcliffe girls." Daniel Patrick Moynihan   "I am not a communist, because communism concentrates and causes all the forces of society to be absorbed by the state, because it necessarily ends in the centralization of property in the hands of the state, while I desire the abolition of the state—the radical extirpation of this principle of the authority and the tutelage of the state which, under the pretext of moralizing and civilizing men, has until now enslaved, oppressed, exploited, and depraved them." Mikhail Bakunin   "If nature has established authority, it is the father's power, but this power has limits; and in nature it ceases as soon as the children are in a state to look after themselves." Denis Diderot   "Slavery educates, or draws out, and strengthens, by example and exercise, to an inordinate degree, the natural lust of authority, common as an element of character in all mankind. To a degree, that is, which makes its satisfaction inconvenient and costly—costly of other means of comfort, not only to the individual, but to the community. Thus, a man educated under the system will be disposed no longer than he is forced, by law or otherwise, to employ servants or laborers who may make demands upon him, and if those demands are refused, may in their turn legally refuse to obey him. He will prefer to accept much smaller profits, much greater inconveniences, than would a man otherwise educated, rather than submit to what he considers to be the insolence of a laborer, who maintains a greater self-respect, and demands a greater consideration for his personal dignity, than it is possible for a slave to do." Frederick Law Olmsted   "The 'mandate' from the beginning was an illusion. The 'mass man,' as we have seen, is a creature of impulses, not desires; he is utterly unable to draw up instructions for his representative to follow. What in fact has happened, whenever the disposition of 'popular government' has imposed itself, is that the prospective representative has drawn up his own mandate and then, by a familiar trick of ventriloquism, has put it into the mouth of his electors: as an instructed delegate he is not an individual, and as a 'leader' he relieves his followers of the need to make choices for themselves. And similarly, the plébiscite is not a method by which the 'mass man' imposes his choices upon his rulers; it is a method of generating a government with unlimited authority to make choices on his behalf. In the plébiscite the 'mass man' achieved final release from the burden of individuality: he was told emphatically what to choose." Michael Oakeshott   "For Hobbes the state of nature represents much more than a breakdown of political authority. Rather, it describes a moment of almost primordial chaos, of absolute disorder, or even annihilation, comparable in some ways to the condition of the universe immediately before the creation. In short, the state of nature for Hobbes was synonomous with destruction of the capacity for meaningful social intercourse itself. Interpreted in this way as a condition of absolute privation, Hobbes's state of nature set the stage upon which the radical reconstructive pretensions of his political philosophy could appear as a plausible act of political creation." David Johnston   "Admittedly the bourgeois introduced many material conveniences, such as good drainage, water closets, baths and armchairs. 'Comfort,' writes Clive Bell in his study of Civilization, 'came in with the middle classes.' Yet they also rendered utilitarianism fashionable and by despising the useless they robbed mankind of grace. Under their domination aesthetic taste disappeared abruptly from Europe; the individual craftsman became the factory hand; and the calamity occurred that the half century which witnessed the most extensive building in all history coincided with the fifty years during which, for the first and I trust last time, architectural taste and invention perished in Europe. Norman Shaw was nearly thirty years of age when Charles Barry died; yet what atrocious damage was done to our cities in the interlude when the authority of the latter had waned and before the influence of the former became active. Even Mr John Betjeman could scarcely deny that the mid-nineteenth century, in spite of its great achievements in other areas, created wider, more expensive and more durable ugliness than any other epoch in the known history of mankind." Harold Nicolson   "The state is born out of the relative weakness of the old order of tribes and clans. It is a permanent revision of the political order, which introduces a standing central government over the tribes and clans. This includes the establishment of a professional armed force that is not disbanded in peacetime, a bureaucracy capable of raising taxes sufficient to maintain such a force; and a ruler or government with the authority to issue decrees that are then imposed, where necessary, by means of armed force. Such government concentrates an unprecedented degree of power in the hands of a small number of individuals—power that can be used to defend the tribes against external enemies, for adjudicating and suppressing disputes among them, and for instituting uniform religious rites on a national scale." Yoram Hazony   "The girls in men's clothing win the men they love by a more laborious means, for they cannot use veils and coquetry; they must offer and not exact service, and as valets they must see their loved ones at their least heroic. In As You Like It Rosalind finds the means to wean Orlando off his futile Italianate posturing, disfiguring the trees with bad poetry; love at first sight for a stranger lady who addressed kind words to him on a day of victory becomes the love of familiarity for a sexless boy who teaches him about women and time, discovering her own role as she teaches him his, thereby leaping the bounds of femininity and tutelage. In Romeo and Juliet the same effect is got by Romeo's overhearing Juliet's confession of love, so that she cannot dwell on form, however fain. Because their love is not sanctioned by their diseased society they are destroyed, for Shakespearean love is always social and never romantic in the sense that it does not seek to isolate itself from society, family and constituted authority. In Midsummer Night's Dream obsession is shown as hallucination and a madness, exorcized by the communal rite. Portia in The Merchant of Venice only manages to show Bassanio the worth of what he really found in his leaden casket when she dons an advocate's gown to plead for Antonio, her husband's friend and benefactor, so that her love is seen to knit male society together, not to tear it apart." Germaine Greer   "What may become of man's inventions when some plodding, persevering schemer (content to starve in his closet in hopes of perfecting a project that may win him fame and benefit his country) is peremptorily called upon to abandon his hopes and yield to the bidding of authority? What even may become of the best portion of man's nature (of his industrial, skilful, persevering, saving energies), when some aspiring, hopeful individual, resolving to labour and to save while youth and vigour favour him, in hopes of realizing leisure and independence, or to procure some cherished object of his heart, is constrained to abandon his resolution, to conform to the routine of the majority, and to make their aspirations the standard of his own? Of what advantage the splendour and enjoyment of all art and nature if man has no choice of enjoyment? And what to him would be spacious halls, and luxurious apartments, and all the promised blessings of a community, if he must rise, work, dress, occupy, and enjoy, not as he himself desires, but as the fiat of the majority wills it? Surely the poorest labourer, bowed down with toil and poverty, would have reason to bless the individualism that gave him some freedom of choice, and a chance of improving his lot, compared with a fellowship that so bound him in bondage." William Lovett   "We on this side propose entire disarmament. We believe in an international police force. I do not believe that we could get satisfactory sanctions by means of a number of individual national forces which would have to be called up by a central authority. I think we have to go much further than that. I want to see air forces abolished, and an international air service. I should like to see navies abolished, and an international mercantile marine. I should like to see all the armies of separate states abolished, in exactly the same way as, in civilised countries, we make people hand over their revolvers and rely on the police force. Of course, there must be a police force which is loyal to the ideals. But I also suggest that, without that, we may get a useful breathing space by qualitative disarmament." Clement Attlee