Quote

Authority and power are two different things: power is the force by means of which you can oblige others to obey you. Authority is the right to direct and command, to be listened to or obeyed by others. Authority requests power. Power without authority is tyranny.

Jacques Maritain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jacques Maritain
Age: 90 †
Born: 1882
Born: November 18
Died: 1973
Died: April 28
Diplomat
Pedagogue
Philosopher
Writer
Paris
France
Obey
Two
Tyranny
Power
Command
Government
Direct
Oblige
Without
Authority
Requests
Right
Force
Obeyed
Mean
Means
Request
Different
Listened
Things
Others

More quotes by Jacques Maritain

Image
There is no place in the world but contains some trace of God.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Absolute atheism starts in an act of faith in reverse gear and is a full-blown religious commitment. Here we have the first internal inconsistency of contemporary atheism: it proclaims that all religion must necessarily vanish away, and it is itself a religious phenomenon.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Everywhere in the world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The tragedy of the modern democracies is that they have not yet succeeded in realizing democracy.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The division between the useful arts and the fine arts must not be understood in too absolute a manner. In the humblest work of the craftsmen, if art is there, there is a concern for beauty, through a kind of indirect repercussion that the requirements of the creativity of the spirit exercise upon the production of an object to serve human needs.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The equality of rights of all citizens is the basic tenet of modern democratic societies.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The act of philosophizing involves the character of the philosopher.
Jacques Maritain
Image
If it is correct to say that there will always be rightist temperaments and leftist temperaments, it is nevertheless also correct to say that political philosophy is neither rightist nor leftist it must simply be true .
Jacques Maritain
Image
We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve
Jacques Maritain
Image
Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy.
Jacques Maritain
Image
To be free is of the essence of every intellectual being.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The light of common sense is fundamentally the same light as that of science, that is to say, the natural light of the intellect. But in common sense this light does not return upon itself by critical reflection, and is not perfected by what we shall learn to know as a scientific habit.
Jacques Maritain
Image
When one's function is to teach the loftiest wisdom, it is difficult to resist the temptation to believe that until you have spoken, nothing has been said.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The day when efficacy would prevail over truth will never come for the Church, for then the gates of hell would have prevailed against her.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
Jacques Maritain
Image
The spiritual experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil of philosophy that without it there is no philosophy and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or must not, enter into the intelligible texture of philosophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of nothing but the truth.
Jacques Maritain
Image
A single idea, if it is right, saves us the labor of an infinity of experiences.
Jacques Maritain
Image
In point of fact, Western philosophy has never set itself free of Christianity: wherever Christianity did not have a hand in the construction of modern philosophy it served instead as a stumbling block.
Jacques Maritain
Image
Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so dam serious.
Jacques Maritain