"The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages."

– Banksy, Wall and Piece

"Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground."

– Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

"The disappearance of a sense of responsibility is the most far-reaching consequence of submission to authority."

– Stanley Milgram

"Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man's natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him."

– Bertrand De Jouvenel, On Power