Quotes About Control

It is vain to say that enlightened statesmen will always be able to adjust their interests. Enlightened men will not always be at the helm.

Men try to run life according to their wishes; life runs itself according to necessity.

Superstition changes a man to a beast, fanaticism makes him a wild beast, and despotism a beast of burden.

It's only men that I strip and flip. My companies I hold long and close to my heart.

If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules

the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.

The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.

Seven billion who need to be kept happy, and docile, until the end. How do you do that? What's the best way to calm down a scared kid, get them to go back to sleep? Tell them a story. Some shit about Jesus or whatever.

They made data a controlled substance.

We could end up in prison married to the guy with the most cigarettes.

I'm ready to commit to her at any time. But for god's sake, I'm not even sure she's heterosexual. It'd be madness to put a lesbian in charge of my ejaculatory functions.

I guessed that by pretending to be the leader I could make a few things go my way, at least for a little while, until they figured out I was faking it.

the whole idea of stealing fantastically dangerous weapons presents the would-be perp with inherent dangers and contradictions: When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins.

As part of Mr. Lee's good neighbor policy, all Rat Things are programmed never to break the sound barrier in a populated area. But Fido's in too much of a hurry to worry about the good neighbor policy. Jack the sound barrier. Bring the noise.

Is this some exercise in keeping a straight face?

Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. Right

When you are wrestling for possession of a sword, the man with the handle always wins. Hiro

the ability to kill someone is basically a mental stance, and not a question of physical means; a serial killer armed with a couple of feet of clothesline is far more dangerous than a cheerleader with a bazooka.

But unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one's mind.

That's even worse. They'll steal it. Then they'll say they didn't steal it, they confiscated it. I know you Feds, you're always confiscating shit.

Is it a virus, a drug, or a religion... What's the difference

When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override.

Don't have their own police force—no immigration control—undesirables can walk right in without being frisked or even harassed. Now a Burbclave, that's the place to live. A city-state with its own constitution, a border, laws, cops, everything.

Any power structure one of whose main goals was to prevent humans from fucking each other at will had to be extremely formidable.