Quotes About Control

Members are indoctrinated to believe that the Training Routines will help them be more effective in their lives—earn more money, be better communicators, get better jobs. Later they are told that by performing these routines they will help clear the planet of poverty, crime, disease—indeed, of all of humanity's problems. At the highest level, members are told that they can control matter, energy, space, and time. The truth is, they are the ones being controlled.

News items are excellent for eliciting fear and inculcating phobias. Cult leaders like to tell members about floods, earthquakes, fires, famines, plagues, and wars–as proof that the last days have arrived.

At a 1937 conference of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, Stalin's people applauded him for eleven consecutive minutes, fearing that the first to stop would be killed or sent to prison. Finally, one man stopped, the director of a paper factory. "To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down," writes Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. That same night the director of the paper factory was arrested and sent to prison for ten years.

The more independent a person is, financially and physically, the less controlled he is by the cult.

the process of controlling people by mentally hijacking their rational thought processes.

We don't like feeling that events are out of control, so we put reality into an order that makes sense to us.

all groups are not evil. In fact, the good part of being involved with a healthy group—be it a religious, social or political—is that you can exercise control over your participation. You do not have to stay one minute longer than you want. Nor do you have to sit silently and blame yourself, if you don't understand what is being said or done. You can question, and you can question some more. Not only is this all right, it is your Constitutional right.

People like to think they are rational and in control, but the lessons of history and social psychology demonstrate, time and again, that simply isn't so. We go about our days, and our lives, using unconscious mental models. When cult leaders manipulate those models, in subtle and overt ways, we can be persuaded to believe and do things we might never have considered without such systematic psychological influence.

By this Orwellian logic, happiness is suffering and suffering is happiness.

It is important to remember that, for the most part, people don't join cults. Cults recruit people.

Information provides the tools with which we think and understand reality. Without accurate, up-to-date information, we can easily be manipulated and controlled.

Inspiring fear of real or imagined threats override's people's sense of agency. It makes them susceptible to a confident authority figure who promises to keep them safe, and can make them more compliant and obedient.

God is the decider and the determiner of every man's destiny, the controller of every detail in every individual's life, which is another way of saying, "He is God."1 — John MacArthur

Even if you know you're sleeping, you're still at the mercy of your dreams. People who are asleep can't simply decide to wake up. Nightmares don't let you off that easily. They hold you in their clutches until they decided, in their own good time, to let you go.

Over the years, I've found that anger is necessary, but it must reach an equilibrium: You need just enough but never too much. If you don't let it in, you become hollow; but if you let it take over, you become its slave.

Even if you know you're sleeping, you're still at the mercy of your dreams. People who are asleep can't simply decide to wake up. Nightmares don't let you off that easily. They hold you in their clutches until they decide, in their own good time, to let you go.

How silly people were to eat. They thought they needed food for energy, but they didn't. Energy came from will, from self-control.

and in addition to the feeling of being full there was another more terrifying one, as if a hundred appetites were raging out of control within her. She couldn't explain it, but she felt as if everything was in chaos and something awful was going to happen. She had eaten and now something terrible would occur.

Kessa began to cut her meat into tiny pieces. As a whole it was unmanageable, frightening; but divided and arranged, the meat could be controlled. She cut four pieces. She'd count to four between each bite.

There is nothing more frustrating to a hacker than to see an extension to a system and not be able to keep hands-on.

Discipline must come through liberty…. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined. We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself.

To Dick's mind, the flow of information should be channeled with discretion, with an unambiguous interpretation controlled by the people at the top.

You don't want to take over the universe. You wouldn't know what to do with it beyond shout at it.

I think there are unseen powers who don't want pop music to be anything other than glorified Madonnas.