Quotes About Control

If I was to really get at the burr in my saddle, it's not politics — and this is, I think, probably a horrible analogy — but I look at politicians as, they are doing what inherently they need to do to retain power. Their job is to consolidate power. When you go to the zoo and you see a monkey throwing poop, you go, 'That's what monkeys do, what are you gonna do?' But what I wish the media would do more frequently is say, 'Bad monkey.

If there is ever a fascist takeover in America, it will come not in the form of storm troopers kicking down doors but with lawyers and social workers saying. I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

We're not going to get the jack-booted thugs stomping on a human face that you get in '1984' but we might get the 'Brave New World' where the biggest problem there is how to deal with the fact that everyone is so happy...[W]hat we're going to get is a nanny-type of fascism, if we get one at all...[S]imply because the nanny-state wants to hug you doesn't mean it's not tyrannical if you don't want to be hugged.

I've noticed most people are at their best during the day, in the light. Night fascinates you with its mystery and potential, but it's ominous too because things are easily hidden or lost in the dark, especially control. Most species I've encountered are powerless there. No matter where that dark is—inside or out—you are all at its mercy. It's harder to lose things and easier to find them, including yourself, in the light.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?

Yes, but that's because you're not poor. When you're poor, things just happen to you. You feel like you can't control anything. You're completely at God's mercy. That's why Jesus tells us that the poor are blessed—because having nothing brings you closer to God." "That woman didn't strike me as being especially close to God.

advancing through my schedule without volition, feeling more and more like the graphical lozenge on a media player's progress bar.

The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was.

he only ran that house as a way to

I know Martin sometimes watches pornography, we don't have secrets from each other, and if he didn't watch it he probably would be the only man in Germany who didn't—I think Internet pornography was designed for German men, because they like to be alone and control things and have fantasies of power. But he says he only watches it because I have so many female Internet friends.

That this was what jail was for: people who believed that they, rather than society, made the rules.

If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence.

People who like to be in control of things can have a hard time with intimacy. Intimacy is anarchic and mutual and definitionally incompatible with control. You seek to control things because you are afraid.

His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained.

She was like a bank too big in her mother's economy to fail

his new place would have to be clean and orderly, to signify self-mastery.

Chip's sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender.

I segreti erano potere. I soldi erano potere. Essere necessari a qualcuno era potere. Potere, potere, potere: com'era possibile che il mondo girasse intorno alla lotta per una cosa che creava solitudine e angoscia in chi la possedeva?

He'd realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall.

One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. I thank God, he said, that there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!

Here's the strangeness of having a Tourette's brain, then: no control in my personal experiment of self. What might be only strangeness must always be auditioned for relegation to the domain of symptom, just as symptoms always push into other domains, demanding the chance to audition for their moment of acuity or relevance, their brief shot—coulda been a contender!—at centrality. Personalityness. There's a lot of traffic in my head, and it's two-way.

Develop your pawns or Hulk will smash.

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)