“For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked.”

Pigs Have Wings (1952)

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P.G. Wodehouse 302
English author 1881–1975

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Kenneth Arrow (1921–2017) American economist

Source: 1970s-1980s, The Limits Of Organization (1974), Chapter 4, Authority And Responsibility, p. 65

“Philosophy establishes itself as a discourse by opposition to the authority of received opinion, especially the opinions sedimented as cult and as law. Philosophy puts into question the authority of what has been handed down. It is not just that there is a critique of philosophic authorities; rather, philosophy appears to be characterized by rejection of intellectual authority as such. How is philosophy to distinguish, then, a permissible authority from those many impermissible authorities which it must reject if it is to survive?
Perhaps it would be better to avoid the quandary altogether by dismissing authority in order to consider only the "content" of the claims under consideration, regardless of their pretensions. The dismissal fails for at least two reasons. The first is that there are no claims in philosophic texts that are wholly free at least from the implicit constructions of authority. If criticism takes only the content, then it ends up with something other than the texts that have constituted the discourse of philosophy. There is no Platonic "theory of Forms" dissociable from the Platonic pedagogy, that is, from the teaching authority of the Platonic Socrates. The second reason for not being able to dismiss authority altogether is that the very criticism that wants to look only at contents will impose itself as an authority in its choice of procedure. One will still have authority, but an authority that refuses to raise any question about authority.
Perhaps the question about legitimate authority could be avoided, again, by replying that the obvious criterion for claims in philosophy is the truth. The assumption here is that access to the truth is had entirely apart from the authority of philosophical traditions. Yet it is a biographical fact that one is brought into philosophy by education. First principles are learned most often not by simple observation or by the natural light of reason, but under the tutelage of some authoritative tradition.”

Authority and persuasion in philosophy (1985)

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“A technical argument by a trusted author, which is hard to check and looks similar to arguments known to be correct, is hardly ever checked in detail”

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Univalent Foundations, Vladimir Voevodsky, IAS, March 26, 2014 http://www.math.ias.edu/vladimir/files/2014_IAS.pdf p. 8

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“Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.”

Eugéne Ionesco (1909–1994) Romanian playwright

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“…I keep looking for one more teacher, only to find that fish learn from the water and birds learn from the sky.” (p.275)”

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“The liberals were wide-ranging in their interests, ready to question the orthodoxies of the time, and looking for new horizons. It is always difficult to find people like that, but it is even more difficult today.”

Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) American lawyer

The Liberals' Mistake (1987)
Context: The liberals were wide-ranging in their interests, ready to question the orthodoxies of the time, and looking for new horizons. It is always difficult to find people like that, but it is even more difficult today.
The liberals of the nineteen-thirties were diverse, but they had a common vision. They accepted democracy, the free market, and capitalism. However, they thought that unless the market was not corrected or ameliorated, there would be child labor, neglect of the elderly, dangerous and harmful consumer goods, monopolies squeezing people out of business and forcing down wages — in short, there would be the horror of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution before the British began passing social legislation.

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