Quotes About Control

Why compound the problem by focusing your energy on things that are beyond your immediate control?

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can't shut your mind.

I get it,' said the prisoner. 'Good Cop, Bad Cop, eh?' If you like.' said Vimes. 'But we're a bit short staffed here, so if I give you a cigarette would you mind kicking yourself in the teeth?

Look, he said to his imagination, if this is how you're going to behave, I shan't bring you again.

Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world's greatest creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn't mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath power the turbines of revenge.

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be.

Listen, Peaches, trickery is what humans are all about, said the voice of Maurice. They're so keen on tricking one another all the time that they elect governments to do it for them.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone's mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

Oh, I feel very angry a lot of the time, said Tiffany, but I just put it away somewhere until I can do something useful with it.

I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat. -Lord Vetinari

Two types of people laugh at the law: those that break it and those that make it.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It's the other way around.

When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point- of-view is seldom necessary.

And when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.

He thought about how it might be to be, say, a fox confronted with an angry sheep. A sheep moreover, that could afford to employ wolves.

Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them.

Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.

The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not…what do they call it…go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. THEN go postal. But with precision.

Taxation is just a sophisticated way of demanding money with menaces.

The theater troubled her. It had a magic of its own, one that didn't belong to her, one that wasn't in her control. It changed the world, and said things were otherwise than they were. And it was worse than that. It was magic that didn't belong to magical people. It was commanded by ordinary people, who didn't know the rules. They altered the world because it sounded better.

The key to winning, as always, was looking as if you had every right, nay, duty to be where you were. It helped if you could also suggest in every line of your body that no one else had any rights to be doing anything, anywhere, whatsoever.