Quotes about Authority

In biblical times, they used to stone a few thirteen-year-olds with some regularity, which helped keep the others quiet and at home. The mothers were usually in the first row of stone throwers, and had to be restrained.

The key piece of leverage was this promise: follow these instructions and you don't have to think. Do your job and you don't have to be responsible for decisions. Most of all, you don't have to bring your genius to work.

This desire for external approval and authority directly undermines your ability to trust yourself, because you've handed this trust over to an institution instead. Now, more and more of us are seeing that it's a fraud. The institutions have no magical powers, as they're regularly proved wrong in their ability to select, to mold, and to amplify human beings who care enough to make change happen.

No one runs your life unless you let them. And you have more power than you think.

Without realizing it, they're like clay telling the potter that they know more about pottery than he does and that they can form themselves into pots on their own (Is 29:16).

The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nations greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.

Sire—I have received an order, under your majesty's seal, to put to death all the protestants in my province. I have too much respect for your majesty, not to believe the letter a forgery; but if (which God forbid) the order should be genuine, I have too much respect for your majesty to obey it.

I defy the pope, and all his laws;" and added, "If God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than he did.

But maintained that the bishop of Rome had no authority whatever to dispense with the Word of God.

It is God himself who enables us to accept his Word as our foundation, our presupposition.

Take charge of your life or someone else will!

To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.