The blockchain is custom-made for decentralizing trust and exchanging assets without central intermediaries. With the decentralization of trust, we will be able to exchange anything we own and challenge existing trusted authorities and custodians that typically held the keys to accessing our assets or verifying their authenticity.

The violations of these diesel motors by our company go against everything that Volkswagen stands for... at this time, I don't yet have the answers to all the questions. I'm utterly sorry that we have damaged trust in this way. I offer my deepest apologies to our customers, the authorities, and to the public at large for our misconduct.

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

Some of the authorities would like to remove rhythmic gymnastics from the list of Olympic sports and turn it into art. I think this would be wrong, as rhythmic gymnastics is a true sport - we train around six hours per day and sometimes spend entire days in the gym.

My parents have always had this philosophy that overindulging your children is one of the worst things you could do as a parent. It's something that was hammered into my head growing up. And while my mom and dad are not professional authorities on parenting, I can confirm from experience that they had a point.

Authorities that erect major obstacles to migration - or place severe restrictions on migrants' work opportunities - inflict needless economic self-harm, as they impose barriers to having their labor needs met in an orderly, legal fashion. Worse still, they unintentionally encourage illegal migration.

As a citizen - or even a TV legal analyst - am I required to presume innocence, i.e., that the authorities arrest the wrong person in every case? Not a chance.

Thanks to the Internet in general and social media in particular, the Chinese people now have a mechanism to hold authorities accountable for wrongdoing - at least sometimes - without any actual political or legal reforms having taken place. Major political power struggles and scandals are no longer kept within elite circles.

We will use all lawful tools at our disposal, and that includes authorities under the renewed PATRIOT Act. We firmly believe that our intelligence gathering tools must enable us to collect the information we need to protect the American people.

In the fight against terrorism, national agencies keep full control over their police forces, security and intelligence agencies and judicial authorities.

I was interested by the idea that artists working in a totalitarian dictatorship or tsarist autocracy are secretly and slightly shamefully envied by artists who work in freedom. They have the gratification of intense interest: the authorities want to put them in jail, while there are younger readers for whom what they write is pure oxygen.

Equality legislation, and audits on gender pay gaps, ethnicity and disability, - within companies and public authorities - all aim to stamp out the informal transfer of power through social networks, in favour of appointment through genuine merit.

The National Surveillance State doesn't want anyone to be able to communicate without the authorities being able to monitor that communication.

So far we have not convinced the Chinese authorities. My own brother was refused a visa on what was probably my last chance of seeing him when he was going around the world on a tour. Scott Nearing was similarly refused.

The public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities.... A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions--one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.

Don't let authorities claim you're not qualified. If your soul wants to speak truth to power, you will feel curious. Your inner self will urge and pull you forth. That's your spirit talking. That's your human will, walking.

The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people's interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.

Formation may be the best name for what happens in a circle of trust, because the word refers, historically, to soul work done in community. But a quick disclaimer is in order, since formation sometimes means a process quite contrary to the one described in this book----a process in which the pressure of orthodox doctrine, sacred text, and institutional authority is applied to the misshapen soul in order to conform it to the shape dictated by some theology. This approach is rooted in the idea that we are born with souls deformed by sin, and our situation is hopeless until the authorities "form" us properly. But all of that is turned upside down by the principles of a circle of trust: I applaud the theologian who said that "the idea of humans being born alienated from the Creator would seem an abominable concept." Here formation flows from the belief that we are born with souls in perfect form. As time goes on, we subject to powers of deformation, from within as well as without, that twist us into shapes alien to the shape of the soul. But the soul never loses its original form and never stops calling us back to our birhtright integrity.

Now that science has helped us to overcome the awe of the unknown in nature, we are the slaves of social pressures of our own making. When called upon to act independently, we cry for patterns, systems, and authorities. If by enlightenment and intellectual progress we mean the freeing of man from superstitious belief in evil forces, in demons and fairies, in blind fate--in short, the emancipation from fear--then denunciation of what is currently called reason is the greatest service reason can render.

Realizing the seriously ruthless, venomous habits and agendas of evil always instills a more fierce passion and longing for a closer God. Men, out of pride, may claim their own authorities over what constitutes good and evil; they may self-proclaim a keen knowledge of subjective morality through religion or science. But that is only if they are acknowledging the work of evil as a cartoon-like, petty little rain cloud in the sky that merely wants to dampen one's spirits. On the contrary, a man could be without a doubt lit with the strength, the peace, and the knowledge of the Gods, his Gods, but when or if the devils grow weary in unsuccessful attempts to torment him, they begin tormenting his loved ones, or, if not his loved ones, anyone who may attempt to grasp his philosophies. No matter how Godly he may become, God is, in the end, his only hope and his only grace for the pressures built around him - it is left up to a higher authority and a more solid peace and a wider love to eclipse not just one's own evils but all evils for goodness to ultimately matter. If all men were Gods, each being would dwell in a separate prison cell, hopeless, before finally imploding into nothingness.

Our authorities leave us no doubt that the trust lodged with the oligarchy was sometimes abused but it certainly ought not to be regarded as a mere usurpation or engine of tyranny.

Central authority is bad. The bias should be for freedom. And without a central authority there are lots of little authorities and we learn which ones to trust.

Writing I'm convinced should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

We show deference to the civil authorities when they respect the divine origin of their power and when they serve the people with objective reference to the law of God.