Quotes About Control

I have often felt that I am being watched. That my life is being witnessed by unseen forces, that adjustments are made as these forces see fit, to thwart me, to humiliate me.

If we can figure everything out, if we can be so smart that we can fit everything into some sort of a plan or order, a complete intellectual understanding, then perhaps we won't be threatened.

I know liquor's a good servant but a bad master.

You're not the boss of me," she told him breathlessly. His chuckle sounded strangled. "Pretend I am for a while.

Stupid people go to college butsmart people own them....

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever they need them.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. —W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming

God has never sat around biting his nails, wondering what Hitler and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were going to do.

The heart itself is beyond control. That is its power, and its weakness.

Aren't we all pawns in the hands of time, the greatest player of them all?

O sea que, ya ve: la maquinaria industrial de los imperios de medios de comunicación más grandes del siglo XX transformada en una cosa que usted puede manejar desde su propio ordenador. Ayer las instalaciones informáticas más grandes del mundo trabajaban para el gobierno, las grandes empresas y los laboratorios de investigación. Hoy trabajan para usted. Esto ha sido lo que ha traído consigo el desktop.

It's a terrible era when idiots are allowed to govern the blind

we have on earth exactly the amount of time that has been allotted to us, no more and no less. We really have precious little control.

there is nothing that frightens that man more than a woman who does not live happily under a man's thumb.

Cruelty may be defined as violence without provocation and discipline that is excessive.

Where do you go when the part of your brain that controls judgment is asleep, but the part that controls your motor activity is awake?

There are times when you want to turn up the volume on life and times when you want to turn it down and times when you just want to turn it off.

Yeah, right, I thought. God hadn't asked me if I wanted to go deeper, and thank you very much, I liked the shallows. It's easier to play when there's no current. In the middle you lose your footing; you lose control. You lose.

every woman's mind is her kingdom. Rule it wisely, lassie.

No one who lives under constant surveillance, who is subject to detention anywhere at any time, whose conversations, proclivities, and habits are recorded, stored, and analyzed, can be described as free.

Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.

Force," Simone Weil wrote, "is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates."2

Corporate totalitarianism, for me, is interchangeable with inverted totalitarianism, as Wolin uses that term throughout his book.