Quotes About Control

The sovereign power [or soft despot] extends its arms over the entire society; it covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated, minute, and uniform rules . . . it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it represses, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally it reduces each nation to being nothing more than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd. ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America1

One of the greatest truths in psychology is that the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict.1 To be human is to feel pulled in different directions, and to marvel—sometimes in horror—at your inability to control your own actions.

It grabs the wrist of the other hand and tries to stop it from executing the person's conscious plans. Sometimes, the alien hand actually reaches for the person's own neck and tries to strangle him.13

When you know what something is, you have power over it.

Besides, lead someone down an unknown road and soon there're completely lost without you. I just have to keep the others from interfering for a short while. Any suggestions? -Kill them. -Kill them. -Kill them. -Kill them. -Hmmm. Okay.

Your freedom it says. What is that? Some kind of illusory concept where the people in charge let you have comfortable distractions. Enough THINGS so that you don't see your chains. I respect your work too much to let you endure that kind of self-deception.

Icy people often freeze themselves in order to hold in check a volcanic stew of disturbing and conflictual feelings. Emotional hibernation, if you will. Crack the ice and the stuff inside comes pouring out with all the discipline of molten lava.

Overweening arrogance and why not? No one had told him no for a very long time.

Either live in thrall to statistics or make them your friends.

At first, when a child meets something that scares him, the fear grows, like a wave. But when he goes into the water and swims - gets used to the water - the wave grows small. If we pull the child away when the wave is high, he never sees that, never learns how to swim and remains afraid. If he gets a chance to feel strong, in control, that's called coping. When he copes, he feels better.

Once available, the inquisitorial toolbox could be put to use by any authoritarian regime with the will and the means to unpack and use it.

What the men in black did to their victims with such tools was not a crime.

after all, a great power is a great power, it doesn't become one by chance, and doesn't remain one by chance, either.

If people stop having secrets they stop having power.

Rage was sometimes a useful ally in the heat of a fight, but it was a trickster. It made everything seem possible.

Sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage.

But the colonel said and did nothing as the seconds splintered off the clock and fell like debris on the floor.

Dubya was their public face, and may not have even known it. He's a Texas jokester who couldn't manage a Wal-Mart and the Inner Circle put him in the Oval Office for two terms while they moved behind the scenes." "What about the current administration?" asked Gault. "The Inner Circle doesn't have the same kind of control over this president, which is why they are trying to weaken him and discredit his accomplishments.

They're politicians, and politics is about leverage, not about the truth.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. —NIELS BOHR

Of course, we could do simulations with random number generators and make statistical predictions about long-term outcomes. But suppose that what looks to us like a random event is really controlled by forces outside our perceptible sphere?

People are not usually deprived of their liberties all at once, but gradually, by one encroachment after another, as it is found they are disposed to bear them.

Why do humans never do as they're told? Someone should replace you all with robots. No, on second though, they shouldn't, bad idea.

The only way out of this mess, of course, is to take steps to ensure that you control the idiots that you become. To take your chain gang, hand in hand, and lead them. The best way to do this is with a list.