Quotes About Control

When we approach the journey acknowledging what we do not know and what we can't control, we maintain our energy for the quest.

Colonialism was made possible, and then sustained and strengthened, as much by cultural technologies of rule as it was by the more obvious and brutal modes of conquest that first established power on foreign shores… Colonialism was itself a cultural project of control.

simple logic of colonialism, under which the rules of humanity applied only to the rulers, for the rulers were people and the people were objects. Objects to be controlled, disciplined, kept in their place and taught lessons like so many animals:

As Henry Nevinson also pointed out, the rule of law, such as it was, functioned in a system in which Indians were 'compelled to live permanently under a system of official surveillance which reads their private letters, detains their telegrams, and hires men to watch their actions'. This, then, was the rule of law the British taught us. We have much to unlearn.

British cartography defined spaces the better to rule them; the map became an instrument of colonial control. Even the valuable British legacy, the museum, was devised in furtherance of the imperial project because here objects, artefacts and symbols could be appropriated, named, labelled, arranged, ordered, classified and thus controlled, exactly as the people could be.

Dominance and submission can be a game or a way of life, depending on how seriously you play...the promise of pleasure can be every bit as arousing as the pleasure itself, maybe more. (Jack)

Watch that mouth, cher. I own a ball gag. I know how to use it," he growled.

She'd never imagined that her vagina had the power to destabilize a whole country.

Inglis is full of metaphors about hands because they've been so important to our human development. It'll come in handy, we say. This child's a handful, and This is getting out of hand, or You're in good hands.

I have often found anger more comfortable than fear. Anger gives me the illusion of control, while fear leaves me naked and exposed.

That was what bothered him most: the fact that she seemed to encourage his advances, and even granted him certain liberties, up to the point at which she turned on him with violence or laughter. He did not know which was worse, the chuckling or the blows; there was something terribly unmanly about being on the receiving end of either. But he looked forward to a time when he could repay her, could laugh at her or strike her as he saw fit. Thus marriage was already in his mind. Next

The end of worship amongst men, is power. —Thomas Hobbes

The lesson of Hobbes and Tocqueville can be boiled down to a brief but chilling dictum: concentrated power, whether of a Leviathan, a benevolent despotism, or a superpower, is impossible without the support of a complicitous citizenry that willingly signs on to the covenant, or acquiesces, or clicks the "mute button.

When power is organized in the form of an economy based upon private capital and the division of labor, then ipso facto the lives of most persons will be directed by others. Dependence is thus institutionalized as inequalities of reward and, consequently, of power.

Thus, early on, while the people were declared "sovereign," they were precluded from governing.

In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.

The corporate state, Wolin told me, is "legitimated by elections it controls." To extinguish democracy, it rewrites and distorts laws and legislation that once protected democracy. Basic rights are, in essence, revoked by judicial and legislative fiat. Courts and legislative bodies, in the service of corporate power, reinterpret laws to strip them of their original meaning in order to strengthen corporate control and abolish corporate oversight.

The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as is foreshadowed in the timidity of current Democratic proposals for reform.

What is at stake here is the control of public space and the power to depict, to discourage and intimidate, and ultimately to filter what is happening and being expressed at a time when technology makes filtering relatively easy.

Police control over demonstrators, combined with the media's censorship of popular protests and of third party activities, produces for inverted totalitarianism what Fascist thugs and censorship accomplished for the classic version.

the effective exercise of managerial skills dictates certain institutional requirements, among them strong and centralized authority, a hierarchical power structure, top-down control, and an aversion to whistle-blowers.

In classical totalitarian regimes it was assumed that total power demanded that the entirety of society's institutions, practices, and beliefs had to be dictated from above and coordinated (gleichgeschaltet), that total power was achievable only through the control of everything from the top.

Managed democracy is centered on containing electoral politics; it is cool, even hostile toward social democracy beyond promoting literacy, job training, and other essentials for a society struggling to survive in the global economy. Managed democracy is democracy systematized. The United States has become the showcase of how democracy can be managed without appearing to be suppressed.

an intrusive government of the politically self-righteous