#authority

Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts. ↗

— Philip Roth

#audacity #authority #beauty #belief #contest

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority. ↗

— Hu Shih

#authority #breakdown #mean #old #revolutions

...But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it. ↗

— Michael Copperman

#authority #culpability #race #representation #art

A child who passes through many hands in turn, can never be well brought up. At every change he makes a secret comparison, which continually tends to lessen his respect for those who control him, and with it their authority over him. If once he thinks there are grown-up people with no more sense than children the authority of age is destroyed and his education is ruined. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#education #age

The Kantian imperative to have the courage to think for oneself has involved a contemptuous disregard for the resources of tradition and an infantile view of authority as inherently oppressive. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#individualism #rationalism #tradition #courage

I'm a lion in a strange land. ↗

— Criss Jami

#awkwardness #beast #courage #different #earth

When your family is twice as weird as normal, you have to be twice as polite to authority, because authority hates weird. ↗

— Rosemary Clement-Moore

#politeness #family

You understand Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and ibexes. ↗

— Astrid Lindgren

#etiquette #humor #humor

I doubt that my sense of personal freedom is any stronger than anybody else's. I'm happy to respect authority when it's genuine authority, based on moral or intellectual or even technical superiority. I'm eager to follow a hero if we can find one. But I tend to resist or evade any kind of authority based merely on the power to coerce. Government, for example. The Army tried to train us to salute the uniform, not the man. Failed. I will salute the man, maybe, if I think he's worthy of it, but I don't salute uniforms anymore. ↗

— Edward Abbey

#coerce #government #military #respect-for-authority #salute

Our natural rights come from an authority beyond the petty rule of man. ↗

— Bryant McGill

#freedom #right #freedom