Quotes About Control

Trust does not cancel our mind but circumscribes it and tames it—and so we do not succumb to fretting or anxious thoughts of being unsure.

Doubting God is painful and frightening because we think we are leaving God behind, when in fact we are only leaving behind ideas about God that we are used to surrounding ourselves with—the small God, the God within our control, the God who moves in our circles, the God who agrees with us.

Trust like this is an affront to reason, the control our egos crave. Which is precisely the point. Trust does not work because we have captured God in our minds. It works regardless of the fact that, at the end of the day, we finally learn that we can't.

Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort, familiarity, joy, and sorrow—and of the false sense of control those things give us. Letting go of these things is a dying process. Jesus sounds more like a mystic than an intellectual lining up correct thinking.

Sweating bullets to line up the Bible with our exhausting expectations, to make the Bible something it's not meant to be, isn't a pious act of faith, even if it looks that way on the surface. It's actually thinly masked fear of losing control and certainty, a mirror of an inner disquiet, a warning signal that deep down we do not really trust God at all. A

We do not honor the Lord nor do we uphold the gospel by playing make-believe. Neither are those who engage the kinds of issues discussed in this book necessarily on the slippery slope to unbelief. Our God is much bigger than we sometimes give him credit for. It is we who sometimes wish to keep him small by controlling what can or cannot come into the conversation.

The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, "Where can I take back some control here?" eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a plea: "Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.

Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement.

We're on Earth, now, remember. You can do anything you want here as long as you've got money.

The universe was not built on integrity. In the face of weakness, force can and will triumph. All you can do is choose who wields that force. Us or the Starflyer.

Don't worry. The chaps train for civil disobedience suppression. We'll crack a few heads, chuck some of the would-be revolutionaries in jail, and the rest will slink off back to their hovels and drink themselves stupid all night. And if worse comes to worst, well, we've got all the guns, haven't we?

It helped that any sexual impulse he might have felt was effectively neutralized by her drinking. After the first hour of any evening, she was not a pleasant person to be around.

I cheated," the Cat said, and rested a finger on her lips. "Bad lady that I am. I used a small insert." She grinned at the companions, who glared back at her through clenched teeth. "And it was quite difficult to insert, wasn't it, girls? You know, I actually had to hold them down to do it, there was so much girly squealing and wiggling. And look at them now, happy to do as they're told.

You think that isn't you? You believe you are noble and kind? Do you know how the dominance works?

The outcome of Twenty-Eight was that any upright citizen could buy and use weapons-grade material as long as they did not utilize said material to fabricate a weapon.

Secrecy is like oxygen to politicians and defense forces; there's always got to be some of it to keep them going.

I was never a dictator, I just had a huge amount of political clout.

He knew very little about running a case, and everything about watching over people's shoulders.

What is it every authoritarian government says? If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

Traits I can manage, prohibited words I can't.

Ozzie hurriedly loaded in restrictions that would stop the boy wading through porn all night long—

Cults have refined their recruitment operations down the centuries until they have become masters of extracting devotion and money from their damaged followers in exchange for their own vision of salvation.

It's not governments I have an issue with—or not the concept of democratic government, anyway. But all we have now is rule by rich people, the ones who keep ninety percent of the world in relative poverty so their unbalanced market can continue paying for a lifestyle of total excess.

Even your cruelty is a joy, Mistress.