Quotes About Control

Das Schicksal mischt die Karten, wir spielen.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.

He remained restrained and strangely composed. It was a composure born of extreme provocation. It stemmed from a lucidity that lies beyond rage.

Rahel's toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).

Rahel knew that this had happened because she had been hoping that it wouldn't. She hadn't learned to control her Hopes yet.

One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place)

The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.

Man's subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify

Somehow the idea of dictating things, Tilo said, seemed to make her mother feel that she was still the captain of the ship, still in charge of something, and that calmed her down considerably.

Vi?as kv?l?k? v?l?šan?s bija, lai vi?ai b?tu pulkstenis, kam vi?a var?tu main?t laiku, kad vien v?l?tos (tam, vi?aspr?t, Laiks ar? dom?ts).

Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy?

Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won't work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.

Besoin inconscient chez l'homme de détruire ce qu'il ne peut ni soumettre ni adorer. (p.401)

They looked out at the world and never wondered how it worked, because they knew They worked it.

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

Once you own history, it begins to own you.

All you have to do is ask yourselves, who controls the government? And who are the victims of that control?

And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of news media and determine what you and I hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information.

He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy -- you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances well beyond our control. Having more freedom seems better than having less. But to what end? The amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to live for, so ultimately is autonomy.

This is what it means to have autonomy - you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

Somehow, instead of holding on to the lifelong identity that was slipping away from him, he managed to redefine it. He moved his line in the sand. This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives.

Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers. I wrote this book in