“When the power inherent in a position of authority is used to fortify that position, the institution's purpose is subverted. Behaviors are not aligned with the institution';s professed goals; rather they are skewed to preserve the rank, power, salaries, and security of rank-holders. -- "Somebodies and Nobodies", by Robert W. Fuller”
“Evil is not the opposite of love; evilis the absence of love." by Robert W. Chapman. Author of A Certain Fall.”
“By disobeying immoral orders, that individual preserves the institution's highest rank - dignity.”
“At the end of your lives you will not be judged by academic successes, the degrees or diplomas earned, the positions held, the material wealth acquired, or power and prestige, but rather on the basis of what you have become as persons and what you are in conduct and character.”
“But the more significant factor is that one can easily remain free of even the most intense political oppression simply by placing one’s faith and trust in institutions of authority. People who get themselves to be satisfied with the behavior of their institutions of power, or who at least largely acquiesce to the Plegitimacy of prevailing authority, are almost never subjected to any oppression, even in the worst of tyrannies.Why would they be? Oppression is designed to compel obedience and submission to authority. Those who voluntarily put themselves in that state – by believing that their institutions of authority are just and good and should be followed rather than subverted – render oppression redundant, unnecessary.Of course people who think and behave this way encounter no oppression. That’s their reward for good, submissive behavior. As Rosa Luxemburg put this: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” They are left alone by institutions of power because they comport with the desired behavior of complacency and obedience without further compulsion.But the fact that good, obedient citizens do not themselves perceive oppression does not mean that oppression does not exist. Whether a society is free is determined not by the treatment of its complacent, acquiescent citizens – such people are always unmolested by authority – but rather by the treatment of its dissidents and its marginalized minorities.”
“Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.”
“posit by W. B. Yeats: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”