Quotes About Control

Boredom is what happens to people who have no control over their minds.

She's called the secretary, but as far as I can tell she basically runs the school.

Social policy that is coercive is the beginning of a police state.

Ben...hadn't known fear or despair or loss of control in his comfortable middle-class family. Bonnie could teach him a lot that was missing from his character. And he could give her a degree of stability and confidence. Knowing it was sentimental, Simmy nonetheless felt that this was a perfect match, which she would do well to safeguard to the best of her ability. Ben would teach Bonnie to tread more carefully and to think more logically. Each would help the other to grow up.

I had too much power, I thought. I might consume him out of my own curiosity simply because I could. I could stay or go. He could not. He had too much power, I thought. He could reject me. He could break me in two.

It scares you: all the noise, the rattling, the shaking. But the look on everybody's face when you're finished and packing, it's the best smile in the world and there's nobody hurt, and the well's under control.

You can't win without the ball.

You are the leader. You can't do away with tension. You can manage it.

Shouts outdoors announced that the younger boys were home. They tore inside and pounded into the kitchen, then pulled to a halt to gape at her. Alex intervened. 'Ah. Here, Kateri, are the inhabitants of this house known collectively as the barbarian horde. As the Chinese treated the Mongolians, so we share the same territory, and attempt to control, educate, and eventually civilize them.

I can't be everywhere, with everyone." Catherine gave him a squeeze. "That's God's job. And I'm learning we should do our best and leave the rest to Him.

So what to do? . . . She shook her head impatiently. Choice is a largely delusional concept, her tutor used to say. Whether in politics, morals or shopping, we have far less than we imagine. In the end what we have to do often doesn't even figure on our list of pseudo-options.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

If superior abilities and services to society deserve special rewards it may be regarded as axiomatic that the rewards are always higher than the services warrant. No impartial society determines the rewards. The men of power who control society grant these perquisites to themselves.

Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted; and pure love without power is destroyed.

I have depeloped a substance which allows me to command time at my discretion.

My third maxim was to endeavour always to conquer myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than the order of the world, and in general, accustom myself to the persuasion that, except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power;

Não há nada que dominemos inteiramente a nao ser os nossos pensamentos.

For since, with a little well-directed effort, one can change the movements of the brain in animals devoid of reason, it is clear that this can be done even more successfully in human beings, and that even those who have the weakest souls could acquire a very absolute command of all their passions, if one were to take the trouble to train them and guide them properly.

Always to seek to conquer myself rather than fortune, to change my desires rather than the order of the world, and generally to believe that nothing except our thoughts is wholly under our control, so that after we have done our best in external matters, what remains to be done is absolutely impossible, at least as far as we are concerned.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

mechanism. In their slow evolutionary ascent, proto-humans 'found' in this mechanism a 'tool' for controlling the mimetic escalations of interspecific violence, when imitation (stronger in humans than in animals) diffuses dynamics of reciprocal contention and revenge in a given social group.

W]hat is this law of the greatest number which modern governments invoke and in which they claim to find their sole justification? It is simply the law of matter and brute force, the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track. It is precisely here that we find the point of junction of the democratic conception and materialism...

People who have stepped fully into their power know they don't have to push or force things; they know that real power comes from surrender.

But in the darkness of her room he was reminded that helplessness was often a portal to God, because rarely did the fragile, self-serving human pray for things in his complete control.