Quotes About Control

What's better, I wonder - to be a toy for the humans, or to control your own destiny , even if the only way to do so is suicide?

I love a man who doesn't let go of the leash, even when it leads him to ruin.

What I mean is that when people say right person, wrong time, or wrong person, right time, it's usually a cop-out. They think that fate is playing with them. That we're all just participants in this romantic reality show that God gets a kick out of watching. But the universe doesn't decide what's right or not right. You do.

I know how to handle animals taking unauthorized expeditions.

God has planted in us endless hungers. Yet we master them in order to live.

How wrong she'd been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing.

he no longer had enough faith in anger's utility to pursue its course.

he was an increasingly dangerous manipulator of the people's desperate hopes.

We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.

I'd probably long ago have gone seven kinds of crazy, one for each day of the week, if I didn't simplify my life in every area where I do have some control.

I am wary of any gun, anywhere, anytime—except when it's in Stormy's hand. She could sit with her finger on the detonation button of a nuclear weapon, and I would feel safe enough to nap.

I possess everyone who sleeps in the motor court, roam their memories, and embed recurrent nightmares that will destroy their sleep for weeks after I've departed them." "I'd prefer a free continental breakfast.

Among the nations of Earth in all its history, ours is one of the precious few that has not brought forth its Hitler, its Stalin, its Pol Pot, its Mao Tse-tung, its Vlad the Impaler, the one who is never satisfied to have every knee bend to him but wants also to be the architect of a new world by destroying the existing one.

I am getting the chaos I wanted. The problem is, you can switch the chaos on, but chaos itself is in control of the off switch.

Irrational fear feeds on itself and grows. You must deny it.

I suspect she must speak without emotion or otherwise entirely lose the self-control that is required to speak to me at all.

I trusted providence to prevent a sneeze, refused to worry, declined to dwell on negative possibilities, and I did not sneeze, did not sneeze, still did not sneeze, but then I farted.

Fear is the engine that drives the human animal. Humanity sees the world as a place of uncountable threats, and so the world becomes what humanity imagines it to be. They not only live in fear but use fear to control one another. Fearmongering is their true religion.

freedom and civility were barriers to absolute power and to the adoration that the powerful could command of others.

Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audioanimatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, "Yes, we've known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all." He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled.

Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are.

the darkest desire of humankind—to hold absolute power, to control, to command obedience, to eliminate all voices of disagreement and dissent—had found its full expression.

Border to border, from sea to shining sea, police cars and other government vehicles had for some time been equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems that recorded the numbers of the vehicles around them, whether parked or in motion, transmitting them 24/7 to regional archives, which in turn shared the information with the National Security Agency's vast intelligence troves in its million-square-foot Utah Data Center.

Probably they prefer we don't see them, but they want us to know what's happening with the weather because fear debilitates. Maybe they want us frightened, cowering, and pliable.