Quotes About Control

a stoic always kept two files in his mind: one for those things that are up to him and within his power, and one for those that are not up to him and thus beyond his power. If you pay lots of attention to events beyond your power, you will ultimately have a life of fear and guilt; you must let those go and pay attention only to those things within your power.

Understanding the laws of nature does not mean that we are immune to their operations.

Ecclesiastes makes the… astonishing claim that living well here and now in this world depends on time travel being possible—not to us, but to God…God will retrieve every single injustice, every single time, and every single activity…Knowing that God is outside of time and sees it all and will, in the end, bring to judgement both the righteous and the wicked, stops me needing to be in control of everything that happens to me.

I think the way to stop it is to shrug it off. Or take it with your tongue in your cheek. Sure, that's the system. At any rate, it's the system that works for you. It's the automatic control board that keeps you out there where nothing matters, where it's only you and the keyboard and nothing else. Because it's gotta be that way. You gotta stay clear of anything serious.

Just go along with it, he told himself. You get involved with the Night Squad, there's no telling what they might do, even though they work from city hall and are listed officially as policemen.

What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.

But if Smith was right, and gold and silver became money through the natural workings of the market completely independently of governments, then wouldn't the obvious thing be to just grab control of the gold and silver mines?

If 1 percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call "the free market" reflects what they think is useful or important.

the fact that it [the US] can, at will, drop bombs with only a few hours' notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet. No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capacity. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together

Power makes you lazy.

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. —H. L. Mencken

Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it's just randomness.

If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars, the bank owns you. If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars, you own the bank. — American Proverb

What "the public," "the workforce," "the electorate," "consumers," and "the population" all have in common is that they are brought into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating.

So what are people actually referring to when they talk about "deregulation"? In ordinary usage, the word seems to mean "changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like.

here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.

the more we allow aspects of our everyday existence to fall under the purview of bureaucratic regulations, the more everyone concerned colludes to downplay the fact (perfectly obvious to those actually running the system) that all of it ultimately depends on the threat of physical harm.

Whatever its earliest origins, for the last four thousand years money has been effectively a creature of the state.

So what exactly was the point of extracting the gold, stamping one's picture on it, causing it to circulate among one's subjects—and then demanding that those same subjects give it back again?

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don't have to worry about, don't have to know about, and don't have to do.

státní aparát [...] skupina lidí, kteÃ…â"¢í si jako jediní osobují právo - alespo? tehdy, když jsou ve své oficiální roli - používat násilí.

A los académicos les encanta la teoría de Foucault que identifica conocimiento y poder y que insiste en que la fuerza bruta ya no era un factor primordial en el control social. Les gusta porque les favorece: es la fórmula perfecta para aquellos que quieren verse a sí mismos como políticos radicales aunque se limitan a escribir ensayos que apenas leerán una docena de personas en un ámbito institucional

The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.

on a political level, where every arbitrary act of power tends to reinforce a feeling that it's not power, but arbitrariness—that is, freedom itself—that is the problem.