Quotes About Control

A slightly different version of the argument--this is really the core of Max Weber's reflections on the subject--is that a bureaucracy, once created, will immediately move to make itself indispensable to anyone trying to wield power, no matter what they wish to do with it. The chief way to do this is always by attempting to monopolize access to certain key types of information.

it is only by the threat of sticks, ropes, spears, and guns that one can tear people out of those endlessly complicated webs of relationship with others (sisters, friends, rivals Ã¢â'¬Â¦) that render them unique, and thus reduce them to something that can be traded.

The promulgation of consumerism also coincided with the beginnings of the managerial revolution, which was, especially at first, largely an attack on pupular knowledge...the new bureaucratically organized corporations and their 'scientific management' sought as far as possible to literally turn workers into extensions of the machinery, their very move predetermined by someone else.

It is the premise of this book that we live in a deeply bureau­cratic society. If we do not notice it, it is largely because bureau­cratic practices and requirements have become so all-pervasive that we can barely see them—or worse, cannot imagine doing things any other way.

all imperial arrangements do, ultimately, rest on terror.

We would like to suggest that these three principles - call them control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma - are also the three possible bases of social power. The threat of violence tends to be the most dependable, which is why it has become the basis for uniform systems of law everywhere; charisma tends to be the most ephemeral.

If 'the state' means anything, it refers to precisely the totalitarian impulse that lies behind all such claims, the desire effectively to make the ritual last forever.

Police are bureaucrats with weapons.

Efficiency' has come to mean vesting more and more power to managers, supervisors, and presumed 'efficiency experts,' so that actual producers have almost zero autonomy.

The wealth we create is like a bonfire. If controlled, it can warm our families. If allowed to spread wildly, it can devastate.

Il suffisait parfois d'un petit marchandage de rien du tout pour venir à bout des grandes choses - le temps, le destin, Dieu…

There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can. . . . Let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason.

The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.

he [Robert Lovett] knew that those whose names were always in print, who were always on the radio and television, were there precisely because they did not have power, that those who did hold or had access to power tried to keep out of sight. Halberstam, David; John McCain (2002-03-26). The Best and the Brightest (Modern Library) (Kindle Locations 448-449). Modern Library. Kindle Edition.

Advertising," he wrote, "now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.

It reflected the belief that a largely uncontrolled capitalism such as existed in America might be ruinous for Japan, that without sufficient controls too few men would become too rich in too poor a nation. That would create intolerable tensions and divisions, so the state and the capitalists themselves had to regulate it.

In a new, modern, industrial, demographically young society, this was symbolized by nothing so much as congressional control by very old men from small Southern towns, many of them already deeply committed, personally and financially, to existing interests; to a large degree they were the enemies of the very people who had elected John F. Kennedy. He was caught in that particular bind.

The networks at their worst (were) at once greedy and timid.

What the President was learning, and learning to his displeasure (once again, the Bay of Pigs had been lesson one), was something that his successor Lyndon Johnson would also find out the hard way: that the capacity to control a policy involving the military is greatest before the policy is initiated, but once started, no matter how small the initial step, a policy has a life and a thrust of its own, it is an organic thing.

Events," wrote George Ball, paraphrasing Emerson "are in the saddle, and ride mankind.

he sensed that his own reticence would make it easier to restrain others.

He and Willoughby preferred that the Pentagon and the Truman administration be completely dependent upon them for any information about what was going on in their area of Asia—with no countervailing intelligence to limit his hand. Control intelligence, and you control decision-making.

People are more easily led than driven.

a button that elites can press to open the door to the masses