Quotes About Control

The philosophy was nationalization, centralization, control, regulation. Now this had to end.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

If it does not concern you that the very first act of virtually every totalitarian regime over the last hundred years has been to disarm its population, then you are beyond help.

SABINE THINGS HAVE BECOME SO DIFFICULT. I MUSTN'T WRITE AGAIN. THIS WHOLE AFFAIR HAS GOTTEN TOO INTENSE. TOO REAL, SABINE, YOU DON'T EXIST. I INVENTED YOU. YOU, THE CARDS, THE STAMPS. THE ISLANDS, YOU'RE A FIGMENT OF MY IMAGINATION. I WAS LONELY AND I WANTED A FRIEND. BUT I'M ALMOST OUT OF CONTROL. I'VE STARTED TO THINK I'M IN LOVE WITH YOU. BEFORE IT TAKES ME OVER IT HAS TO STOP. GOODBYE. GRIFFIN

No one, however, should demand respect for public ideas that have the power to oppress others as long as criticism is not a direct incitement to crime. Religious and political ideas are too important to protect with polite deceits, because their adherents can seek to control all aspects of public and private life.

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth.

Boggan got him to translate and heard how hairdressers in Baghdad had to report subversive remarks made by women under the driers. What was a hairdresser to do if her sensibly wary customers steered clear of politics? For how long could she keep telling the secret police that she had nothing to report, without running the risk of the spies marking her down as uncooperative?

Every time you go into your workplace, you leave a democracy and enter a dictatorship.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is typical of dictatorships old and new. It does not try to censor everything. The regime understands that the total control of communism failed because it suppressed too much. On a personal level, the men at the top in the Kremlin do not want to go back to a time when the bribes they received were worth little because the luxuries of capitalism were on the other side of an iron curtain.

The celebrity and the totalitarian share a desire to have their faces in every newspaper and on every television screen.

When all the exceptions have been made, however, Islamic states and paramilitaries are in a league of their own when it comes to religious censorship.

Do something. Make a decision. If you don't, circumstances will decide for you. The enemy loves to tell you what to do.

The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power.

there was no doubt in the world that I was in control of those sessions. The guys knew. So I would try to get the sound down there on the microphone in a cohesive and harmonic medium that started up here in my head. 'I find that search on every song we've ever made: that search for a lost sound.

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

Philosophy, in its longing to rationalize, formalize, define, delimit, to terminate enigma and uncertainty, to co-operate wholeheartedly with the police, is nihilistic in the ultimate sense that it strives for the immobile perfection of death. But creativity cannot be brought to an end that is compatible with power, for unless life is extinguished, control must inevitably break down. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

When you're in the car, how well you do is down to you and you alone-no band, no management, no marketing.

The only real downside to all of this was not to appear for another thirteen years. In the brave new, and very middle-class, alternative world, mainstream politics were rather neglected. By the time anyone realised, it was too late. The wallflowers, who had been left out of all the fun in the Sixties, got their own back during the 1980s by gaining control of the country and vandalising the health service, education, libraries and any other cultural institutions they could get their hands on.

The suggestion was put to us that we should become non-resident in the UK for one year so that we could earn some money and replenish the dwindling coffers, and provide some time for our accountants and tax specialists to salvage something from the wreckage. The whole experience cast an enormous cloud over us. We had always prided ourselves on being smart enough not to be caught out like this. We saw ourselves as educated, middle class, in control of everything. We had been utterly wrong.

I got this idea about being afraid to let go of something and being afraid of sinking into a state of almost anesthesia, where you have to trust other people. Just the paranoia of it all. And it seemed to suit the frenetic track. So I just wrote it out and, you know, said it.

The trigger has been squeezed, the deathly mechanism has been enabled, the fatal course of a bullet has been set. No amount of bleating or praying or wailing of cajoling can halt it or stall it or call it back.

Modernity's like a badly trained dog: try and make it heel, even for a moment, and it turns and bites the hand that fed it.

Hild faced him influencing, because Edwin was like a dog: show fear and he would chose you down. But then she broke her gaze. To challenge an uneasy before his men was to invite death.

Everything the king does is a lie.