Authority Structures Quotes

Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.

Power tires only those who do not have it.

The social arrangements that produce responsibility are arrangements that create coercion, of some sort.

In Afghanistan, legitimate authority has been traditionally highly localized, a product of consensus rather than brute force, and firmly anchored in tribal, clannish, and kinship structures.

If one would discern the centers of dominance in any society, one need only look to its definitions of "virtue" and "vice" or "legal" and "criminal," for, in the strength to set standards, resides the strength to maintain control.

But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

Marriage, laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.

People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

Power is insinuating. Few men are satisfied with less power than they are able to procure.

Part of understanding power is understanding the limits of power.

Within a social structure, a familial structure, or a cultural structure of various kinds, there is a substitute for actual freedom. I mean, actual freedom is a very abstract notion; we have no idea what it means, except within a context - freedom to do what? So within these social structures, freedom becomes defined as power, your ability to make choices, and the power relationship within a family, any family.

Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.

Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.