Quotes About Control

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fewer than 5,000 British officials, about 40,000–70,000 British soldiers, and perhaps another 100,000 British business people, hangers-on, wives and children were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.

Praeityje keli? informacijos t?kmei užkirsdavo cenz?ra. XXI a. cenz?ruojama užtvindant žmones neaktualia informacija.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having

Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today's chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else, but because they have very narrow aims.

When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force.

The discovery of an effective treatment for scurvy greatly contributed to British control of the world's oceans and its ability to send armies to the other side of the world.

humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war,

Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world.

Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life.

Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.

El pánico es una forma de arrogancia

Myths continue to dominate humankind, and science only makes these myths stronger. Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective realities more completely than ever before.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so.

We are conquering you for your own benefit,' said the Persians.

In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.

the mind is never free of manipulation.

Does the data about my DNA, my brain, and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?

The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.

To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be

Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.

though the technological challenges are unprecedented and the political disagreements intense, humankind can rise to the occasion if we keep our fears under control and be a bit more humble about our views.

It was not food shortages that caused most of history's wars and revolutions

If mosquitoes buzzed in our ears and disturbed our sleep, we knew how to kill the mosquitoes; but if a thought buzzed in our mind and kept us awake at night, most of us did not know how to kill the thought.