This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
The authority of reason is far more imperious than that of a master; for he who disobeys the one is unhappy, but he who disobeys the other is a fool.
Frank Lloyd Wright, born Frank Lincoln Wright
The insolence of authority is endeavoring to substitute money for ideas.
Nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far, and relaxed too much.
No body of men can be induced to do another man’s killing for him unless he can convince them that they may honorably do so. The percentage of blackguards and sadists who enjoy cruelty for its own sake have to pretend that they are patriots and ministers of justice to secure the toleration of their fellow citizens.
Body | Cruelty | Justice | Man | Men | Toleration | Cruelty |
Every great example takes hold of us with the authority of a miracle, and says to us, "If ye had but faith, ye, also, could do the same things."
Galileo Galilei, known simply as Galileo
In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth that humble reasoning of a single individual.
Authority | Individual | Science | Worth |
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies in dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power an authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
Authority | Individual | Power | Will |
I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.
Kindness | Silence | Toleration |
A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labour of ratiocination. This instinct, for I know not what other name to give it, has been termed common sense, and more frequently, sensibility; and, by a kind of indefeasible right, it has been supposed, for rights of this kind are not easily proved, to reign paramount over the other faculties of the mind, and to be an authority from which there is no appeal.
Authority | Common Sense | Instinct | Mind | Right | Rights | Sense | Sensibility | Soul | Truth |
Mikhail Bakunin, fully Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin
All temporal or human authority stems directly from spiritual and/or divine authority. But authority is the negation of freedom. God, or rather the fiction of God, is the consecration and the intellectual and moral source of all slavery on earth, and the freedom of mankind will never be complete until the disastrous and insidious fiction of a heavenly master is annihilated.
Authority | Consecration | Earth | Freedom | God | Mankind | Slavery | Will |
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
All authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and it degrades those over whom it is exercised.