resisting authority Quotes

In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable.

Resisting overreaching by the federal government is appropriate and, yes, even patriotic.

Let every person be obedient to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. ... the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the servant of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer

This, to me, is the ultimately heroic trait of ordinary people; they say no to the tyrant and they calmly take the consequences of this resistance.

Prohibition cannot be enforced for the simple reason that the majority of American people do not want it enforced and are resisting its enforcement.

I just don't like being told what to do.

I mean, I never liked being told what to do. It's one of the reasons I dropped out of school.

I developed a problem with authority. Any time that authority was what I interpreted as being unjust, I stood up to it, and that became my personality.

My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.

In those days we were punished very frequently and I felt that it was often unjust, and so I would resist the desire to agree with many, many things. So I used to get beaten quite frequently and I more or less accepted it as part of life.

One of the ways to avoid being beaten by the system is to laugh at it.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.

If you're fighting the system, then you're still caught in it. It's not about fighting the system; it's about ceasing to hold it together. Non-cooperation. We cannot be imprisoned without our cooperation. Their power is in our acquiescence.

Mama gave birth to a hell raising heavenly son. See the doctor tried to smack me, but I smacked him back.

Drop them or let them drop you. I chose droppin' that cop.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

Every people, every society, needs a culture of resistance, a culture of being difficult and disobedient, that is the only way they will ever be able to stand up to the inevitable abuse of power by whoever runs the state apparatus, the capitalists, the communists, the socialists, the Gandhians, whoever.