obedience

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noun

1. The quality or state of willingly carrying out the wishes of others: acquiescence, amenability, amenableness, compliance, compliancy, deference, submission, submissiveness, tractability, tractableness. See resist/yield.
2. An act of willingly carrying out the wishes of others: compliance, observance. See resist/yield.

Definition: good behavior; submissiveness
Antonyms: bad behavior, disobedience, misbehavior, mischief, mutiny, rebellion

The conformity of one person to the will of another by the implementation of that person's orders and instructions. Unquestioning obedience involves a willingness to implement instructions without exceptions. In despotisms and absolute governments, as well as in certain religious and military organizations, such obedience has been considered a virtue, but in liberal, individualist societies it is considered morally reprehensible and dangerous. In experiments published in Obedience to Authority in 1974, the psychologist Stanley Milgram claimed to show that people in modern Western societies (principally, the United States, West Germany, and Australia) were far more obedient than they ought to be according to established ethical theories. In a variety of social situations people obeyed orders, involving the apparent infliction of harm on others, which they ought to have disobeyed according to doctrines of the limits of authority inherent in prevailing ideas about rights, law, and liberty. Milgram offered his experimental evidence as an insight on acquiescence to the Third Reich, inter alia. He diagnosed a ‘fatal flaw’ in mankind, an excessive propensity to obey others, probably developed during the hunter-gatherer stage of human society. Others have criticized his use of data as far-fetched and excessively generalized.

— Lincoln Allison

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Quotes:

"Obedience is better than sacrifice." - Bible

"Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders." - Jean Cocteau

"The reason why men do not obey us is because they see the mud at the bottom of our eye." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Those who know the least obey the best." - George Farquhar

"There is no shame in taking orders from those who themselves have learned to obey." - William Edward Forster

See more famous quotes about Obedience

Look up obedience in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

The term obedience can refer to:

• Obedience (human behavior)
  • The educational film Obedience about the Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures
• Vow of obedience as an evangelical counsel
• Obedience training for dogs
• Obedience trial, a dog sport
• Obedience Plant, another name for the herb Arrowroot
• Obedience, the name given to a masonic jurisdiction

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Common misspelling(s) of obedience

• obediance