Quotes About Control

It is because of speech that men give the illusion of being free. If they did — without a word — what they do, we would take them for robots. By speaking, they deceive themselves, as they deceive others: because they say what they are going to do, who could suspect they are not masters of their actions?

This world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.

No autocrat wields a power comparable to that enjoyed by a poor devil planning to kill himself.

Any disease is healthier than the one provoked by a hoarded rage.

The right to suppress everyone that bothers us should rank first in the constitution of the ideal State.

Some consciences are fitted with automatic answering machine that work very well. But I never got the technology under control

While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political and moral beliefs that control our actions.

Hence we are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.

Liberty is the daughter of authority properly understood. For to be free is not to do what one pleases; it is to be the master of oneself, it is to know how to act within reason and to do one's duty.

La folla è un gregge che non può fare a meno di un padrone».

You can only control your own actions. Not other people's reactions.

May fiddled with her phone, reminding herself she was good at this and in control and that getting the story was more important than feminist principles – or no, not even that, it was that feminist principles demanded she tell the truth about this heinous act of violence against a woman and the blokey, misogynist community in which it happened, and if that required flirting with one or more of said blokey, misogynist community members then that was for the greater good.

In an ordinary despotism, the powers of a despot are limited by his bodily capacity, and by the calls of pleasure; he is but one man; there are but twelve hours in his day, and he is not disposed to employ more than a small part in dull business; he keeps the rest for the court, or the harem, or for society.

Not only does a bureaucracy thus tend to under-government, in point of quality; it tends to over-government, in point of quantity.

Most poets must be prohibited; the exercise of the fancy requires watching.

Religion is the best weapon to rule or use a nation if you know how to use it.

Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing.

As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth.

The State is nothing but this domination and this exploitation, well regulated and systematized.

All exercise of authority perverts, and submission to authority humiliates.

A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.

The State, for its own preservation, must necessarily be powerful as regards foreign affairs; but if it is so as regards foreign affairs, it will infallibly be so as regards home affairs.

An acquaintance with the laws of nature does not always, nor even commonly, carry with it the means of controlling them. Knowledge is seldom power. And a sociologist so coldly independent of the social forces among which he lived as thoroughly to understand them, would, in all probability, be as impotent to guide the evolution of a community as an astronomer to modify the orbit of a comet.