Quotes About Control

And we have no more control over the not yet than we have had over the already.

While the control of sin has been broken, the sin that remains in us still puts up a real fight.

I wanted to serve, but it had to be on my terms and on my time schedule.

Blowing up at people when our agendas are trampled

A Nazi leader outmaneuvers his opponents by manufacturing a general conviction that the present moment is exceptional, and then transforming that state of exception into a permanent emergency.

Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

What the great political thinker Hannah Arendt meant by totalitarianism was not an all-powerful state, but the erasure of the difference between private and public life. We are free only insofar as we exercise control over what people know about us, and in what circumstances they come to know it.

Violence is not confidence, and terror is not mastery.

the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses. The party that exercises such control proposes few policies that are popular with the society at large, and several that are generally unpopular—and thus must either fear democracy or weaken it.

Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you. Try not to have hooks.

Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.

It was easier to triumph in violence that it was to make a new order.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both. You

The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

People who assure you that you can only gain security at the price of liberty usually want to deny you both.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy

Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission.

We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties controls every lever of power at the federal level, as well as the majority of statehouses.

where annual elections end, tyranny begins.

how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it.