Quotes About Control

Sometimes I think I am fate's sword. She wields me cruelly.

Highlight: In a way fighting like this was just like using magic. You said the words, and they altered the universe. By merely speaking you could create damage and pain, cause tears to fall, drive people away, make yourself feel better, make your life worse.

The librarian had imagined he could summon a given book to perch on his hand just by shouting out its call number, but in actuality they were just too willful, and some were actively predatory. The

it was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you—

Their little dance was like the endgame of a disastrously bloody chess match, just a queen chasing a beleaguered king around an empty board, sadistically refusing to checkmate.

Use magic in anger, and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary.

The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.

We invent ourselves out of ingredients we didn't choose, by a process we can't control.

We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them.

It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.

I mean, the more a man was in the Devil's power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk.

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, began screaming, "Off with her head! Off with—"

"Now! Now!" cried the Queen. "Faster! Faster!"

In one sense the reemergence of ancient usury bespeaks a decline in faith. Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If

When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.

Out of bad faith comes a longing for control, for the law and the police. Bad faith suspects that the gift will not come back, that things won't work out, that there is a scarcity so great in the world that it will devour whatever gifts appear. In bad faith the circle is broken.

Money is like fire, an element as little troubled by moralising as earth, air, and water. Men can employ it as a tool or they can dance around it as if it were the incarnation of a god . . . It acquires its meaning from the uses to which it is put.

Also there was considerable distrust of planning in any form. Planning was something the government was going to do to you. The way people in democracies think of the government as something different from themselves is a real handicap. And, of course, sometimes the government confirms their opinion, unfortunately.

Con i mezzi di comunicazione di massa su grandi distanze, l'isolamento della popolazione si è rivelato un mezzo di controllo molto efficace.

Both sacred power and temporal power became swollen by absorbing the new inventions of civilization; and the very need for an intelligent control of every part of the environment gave additional authority to those dedicated either to intelligence or control, the priest or monarch, often united in a single office.

But instead of freeing labor, the royal mega-machine boasted of imprisoning and enslaving it.

This proposal for genetic control exposes the idea of control itself in its ultimate absurdity: the arrogant notion that finite minds, operating with the limited equipment of their particular culture and historic moment, will ever be qualified to exercise absolute control over the infinite future possibilities of human development.

The ancient commks though that their own respect for custom and common law, as against tyrannous caprice, was a unique product of their culture. But actually it was a witness to their continuity with an older village democracy we first meet in Mesopotamia: an institution that seems to precede all more sophisticated exercise of control by a dominant minority, imposing their alien traditions or their equally alien upper-class innovations upon a subjugated if acquiescent population.

Pedro Armillas has pointed out that the crisis that seems to have developed in Meso-American society around 900 A.D. resulted in a change from a theocratic pattern to a secular-militaristic one, "in which religion was still a powerful force social control, but the priesthood was in a subordinate position of temporal power, and there was a correlative change in the settlement pattern.