Obeying Orders Quotes & Sayings

Just go along with things and let your mind move freely. Resign yourself to what cannot be avoided and nourish what is within you - this is best. What more do you have to do to fulfill your mission? Nothing is as good as following orders (obeying fate) - that's how difficult it is! — Burton Watson

Unlike those in other professions, artists cut the branch they are sitting on. — Sarah Thornton

Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism, in particular the freedom to believe what you will in private. But secularism also poses a public problem. There are those whose beliefs are so different from others' beliefs that finding common ground in the public space is impossible. And then there are those for whom the very distinction between private and public is either meaningless or unacceptable. The complex contrivances of secularism have their charm, but not everyone is charmed. — George Friedman

How many spanks have you had, Julia?" Damien asked.
"Two, Sir."
"What colour are you on?"
"Mortification," she mumbled. — Sierra Cartwright

Being Christian is not just obeying orders but means being in Christ, thinking like him, acting like him, loving like him; it means letting him take possession of our life and change it, transform it, and free it from the darkness of evil and sin ... Let us show the joy of being children of God, the freedom that living in Christ gives us which is true freedom, the freedom that saves us from the slavery of evil, of sin and of death! — Pope Francis

Jose loved giving orders to the servants, and they loved obeying her. She always made them feel they were taking part in some drama. — Katherine Mansfield

The girl remembered London as a place of infinite freedom. Now it seemed she'd rented out her whole life to the Joneses in advance. Service had reduced her to a child, put her under orders to get up and lie down at someone else's whim; her days were spent obeying someone else's rules, working for someone else's profit. Nothing was Mary's anymore. Not even her time was hers to waste. — Emma Donoghue

I'll always wait for you. However long it takes — Wesley Chu

You gave up on me," I said a bit more loudly. "You were my friend. And you picked him - picked obeying him, even when you saw what his orders and his rules did to me. Even when you saw me wasting away day by day." "You — Sarah J. Maas

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. — Ilsa J. Bick

ROS: Why don't you go and have a look?
GUIL: Pragmatism?! - is that all you have to offer? — Tom Stoppard

Chaos doesn't run the whole show. — Saul Bellow

God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trusted Isaac up on top of the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two assymetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders.' Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions. — Richard Dawkins

This Ayah indicates that the pious person should express his love to Allah by believing in His Prophet and following the Message, and through obeying the Prophet, abiding by his orders, leaving what he prohibits and obeying all what Allah has revealed to him, because that is the vivid expression of the practical love that fills his whole entity. — Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah

If for one whole day, quietly and determinedly, we were to give ourselves up to the ownership of Jesus and to obeying his orders, we should be amazed at its close to realize all he had packed into that one day. — Oswald Chambers

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained. — Theodore Dalrymple

A Romantic ideology that predates rock glorifies the self-destructive artist as someone who's too honest and delicate for this world ... It's not an easy job, and its stresses can take their toll. — Jon Pareles

He stared into her eyes, now the size of holy-shit-balls. Twenty-twenty? She should be able see the fucking atoms in the air. — Lucian Bane

It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders." "Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally. — Iain M. Banks

Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me. — Robertson Davies

You're wrong Heinrich. While it might seem easy to believe, you and I aren't actually the same. You've been fighting someone else's war, you've been obeying orders, you've been carrying out a part in his plan. You've served other people all your life, for a goal that you won't even see accomplished: that's your defeat. — Luther Blissett

This system of encouragement proves serviceable as a preventive of punishment, the attainment of the tickets being a reward, the forfeiture of them the reverse; and, as such, boys seem often more affected by their loss than by coercion. — Joseph Lancaster

Some people giving orders and others obeying them: this is the essence of servitude. Of course, as Hospers smugly observes, "one can at least change jobs," but you can't avoid having a job - just as under statism one can at least change nationalities but you can't avoid subjection to one nation-state or another. But freedom means more than the right to change masters. — Bob Black

I first got into writing because I got involved in the production of a magazine for army wives. They were short of copy one day and the editor asked me to write a piece about being an army wife "and make it funny". Good at obeying orders I did as I was told, the piece was a success, I was asked to write a regular piece and slowly it ended up as a book. — Catherine Jones

You assist an evil system most effectively by obeying its orders and decrees. An evil system never deserves such allegiance. Allegiance to it means partaking of the evil. A good person will resist an evil system with his or her whole soul. — Mahatma Gandhi

What is power, after all? Every one of the power elite's overwhelming advantages - military forces, surveillance systems, crowd control technology, control over the media, and nearly all the money in the world - depends on having people obeying orders and executing an assigned role. This obedience is a matter of shared ideologies, institutional culture, and the legitimacy of the systems in which we play roles. Legitimacy is a matter of collective perception, and we have the power to change people's perceptions. — Charles Eisenstein

Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It's true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave - now there's a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time. When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth. — Leif Enger

Her entire life was obeying orders. She'd left her Father behind, only to fall into the hands of another dictator. Was her life her own anymore, or was she a puppet on a string, dancing to Ryan's tune? — Callie Hunter

The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders. — H.G.Wells