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Authority vs Dignity - What's the difference?

authority | dignity |

As nouns the difference between authority and dignity

is that authority is the power to enforce rules or give orders while dignity is a quality or state worthy of esteem and respect.

authority

English

Alternative forms

* authourity (obsolete)

Noun

  • (label) The power to enforce rules or give orders.
  • * 1883 , (Howard Pyle), (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood)
  • But in the meantime Robin Hood and his band lived quietly in Sherwood Forest, without showing their faces abroad, for Robin knew that it would not be wise for him to be seen in the neighborhood of Nottingham, those in authority being very wroth with him.
  • (label) Persons in command; specifically, government.
  • *{{quote-book, year=1927, author= F. E. Penny
  • , chapter=4, title= Pulling the Strings , passage=The case was that of a murder. It had an element of mystery about it, however, which was puzzling the authorities . A turban and loincloth soaked in blood had been found; also a staff.}}
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)
  • , title= Legal highs: A new prescription , passage=No sooner has a [synthetic] drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one. These “legal highs” are sold for the few months it takes the authorities to identify and ban them, and then the cycle begins again.}}
  • (label) A person accepted as a source of reliable information on a subject.
  • * 1930 September 18, Albert Einstein, as quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (1988) by Banesh Hoffman
  • To punish me for my contempt of authority', Fate has made me an ' authority myself.

    Derived terms

    * moral authority

    dignity

    Noun

    (dignities)
  • A quality or state worthy of esteem and respect.
  • * 1752 , (Henry Fielding), , I. viii
  • He uttered this ... with great majesty, or, as he called it, dignity .
  • * 1981 , African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights , art. 5
  • Every individual shall have the right to the respect of the dignity inherent in a human being.
  • * 2008 , Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) [Switzerland]
  • 'The dignity' of living beings with regard to plants: Moral consideration of plants for their own sake', 3: ... the ECNH has been expected to make proposals from an ethical perspective to concretise the constitutional term ' dignity of living beings with regard to plants. Dignity of Plants
  • Decorum, formality, stateliness.
  • * 1934 , Aldous Huxley, "Puerto Barrios", in Beyond the Mexique Bay :
  • Official DIGNITY tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.Columbia World of Quotations 1996.
  • High office, rank, or station.
  • * 1781 , Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , F. III. 231:
  • He ... distributed the civil and military dignities among his favourites and followers.
  • * Macaulay
  • And the king said, What honour and dignity hath been done to Mordecai for this?
  • One holding high rank; a dignitary.
  • * Bible, Jude 8.
  • These filthy dreamers speak evil of dignities .
  • (obsolete) Fundamental principle; axiom; maxim.
  • * Sir Thomas Browne
  • Sciences concluding from dignities , and principles known by themselves.

    Synonyms

    * worth * worthiness

    Coordinate terms

    * augustness, humanness, nobility, majesty, grandeur, glory, superiority, wonderfulness

    See also

    * affirmation * integrity * self-respect * self-esteem * self-worth

    References

    * *

    Anagrams

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