Quotes About Control

Like unmixed wine, the dictatorship had a taste that was intoxicating and perilous.

Achievement was worthy of praise and honor, but excessive achievement was pernicious and a threat to the state.

The state had the right to know everything, for the Romans believed that even "personal tastes and appetites should be subject to surveillance and review."4 It was knowledge, intrusive knowledge, that provided the Republic with its surest foundations.

You cannot regulate desire.

Vast and implacable, like a kraken of the deep undisturbed by storms raging across the ocean surface, the apparatus of empire still coiled its prodigious tentacles, ready to flex and squeeze its victims tightly, as it had ever done.

Do what you fear most and you control fear.

Everything in modern society is the result of a collection of decisions made by someone. Why shouldn't that someone be you?

In Fourth Generation war, the state loses its monopoly on war. All over the world,

Macht is uitgesteld geweld, gezag is uitgestald geweld.

And that we, far from being its authors, or its operators, or even its slaves (for slaves are agents who can harbour hopes, however faint, that one day a Moses or a Spartacus will set them free), were no more than actions and commands within its key-chains.

Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past

Imagination is a cruel master to the jealous man.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

With tybo men there isn't much difference between fucking and killing.

If you own yourself, you own the world.

I tell you I'm tired of hearing it. There ain't nothing that happens to a person that ain't that person. The world out there only does what you tell it to do. The world is happening to you the way it is happening because you're telling yourself the story that way. If you want to change the world so damn bad, Ida, then where you got to start is how it is you're looking at it.

Back in the East you can't do much without the right papers, but with the right papers you can do anything The believe in papers. Papers are power.

The God Gone Mad.

It's probably no accident that whenever one hears of a smart technology, it refers to something that has been taken out of human control.

Ultimately, he decreed that anyone who published a book without prior approval would be excommunicated.

On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that… Masters of the Universe.

There are two ways to take over a country. Externally by force or Internally by fiscal collapse.

What you do with your hands you mess up with your feet.

Sharpe's] only goal had been to make people free, he said, and what had been a peaceful movement had spun out of control. But he remained defiant to the end about the idealism of his cause, if not the means. 'I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery!' he said. Belby reported that Sharpe's frame expanded, his spine stiffened, and his eyes seemed to 'shoot forth rays of light' when he said this.