Quotes About Control

It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.

Continuous interpretation is achieved by trying to control every approach to the public mind in such a manner that the public receives the desired impression, often without being conscious of it. High-spotting, on the other hand, vividly seizes the attention of the public and fixes it upon some detail or aspect which is typical of the entire enterprise.

It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad. "They govern us," the author writes, "by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

Domination today is not a product of armies or navies or wealth or policies. It is a domination based on the one hand upon accomplished unity, and on the other hand upon the fact that opposition is generally characterized by a high degree of disunity.

Orwell envisioned a future in which an all-seeing dictatorship would stamp out free thinking and outlaw human intimacy. But the internet has given us something far closer to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell's fear was that Big Brother would always be watching you. Huxley's dread was that we would be too busy watching Big Brother on TV to care. There is no need to ban books if people are not reading them. If the people are entertained, they will also be docile.

Brecht once said: 'All power comes from the people. But where does it go?

in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Science fiction likes to depict a dystopia in which the robots have taken over. A less fantastical idea is that the robots will indeed take over. But it will be at the behest of a narrow elite of human masters.

We often explain ADHD to children using a very simple analogy that certainly resonates with adults, too: A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes. It's the mismatch of engine power to braking capability that causes the problems. Strengthening one's brakes is the name of the game.

The term attention deficit disorder completely misses this point. It is not a deficit of attention that we ADD-ers have, it is that our attention likes to go where it wants to and we can't always control it.

Your reflex to help others starts to control you if you don't understand what's happening and take steps to prevent it.

We've got an overabundance of attention, more attention than we can cope with; our constant challenge is to control it.

worry results from a heightened sense of vulnerability in the presence of a diminished sense of power.

These situations allow the ADD person not only to get into forward motion, but also to forget, to disregard that they need brakes in the first place. In an emergency, it's full speed ahead. What a relief.

A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes.

In fact, we do not suffer from a deficit of attention. Just the opposite. We've got an overabundance of attention, more attention than we can cope with; our constant challenge is to control it.

As mentioned earlier, one way to think about the central challenge in ADHD is gaining better braking control over the metaphorical Ferrari brain, both in terms of the speed at which it operates and the level of emotion it can emit.

A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes. It's the mismatch of engine power to braking capability that causes the problems. Strengthening one's brakes is the name of the game.

Eldredge has just said gives a pretty good short description of ADD: You don't mean to do the things you do do, and you don't do the things you mean to do.

Beware of the deadly donky, falling from the sky' you can choose the way you live, my friend, but not the way you die.

It's dismaying to see the unilateralism that the government is doing.

A great deal remains to be learned about the genetic control of brain development

Most crimes and misdemeanors by slaves were dealt with by their masters; they could even hang a slave if he killed another slave, but that would have been like throwing money down a well after the slave had already thrown the first load of money down, as William Robbins once told Skiffington.