Quotes About Control

To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the odds are completely against them. It doesn't make the landing at the end of that fall any less painful but, somehow, it helps them keep a little dignity their bone broken body.

Far from wishing to awaken the artist in the pupil prematurely, the teacher considers it his first task to make him a skilled artisan with sovereign control of his craft.

A showdown meant war. The whole Positive Control system really depended on equipment that could never really be tested until the time came for its first use, and because of this nobody could ever really know in advance whether or not it would work right. The Fail-Safe machines could be truly tested only once: the single time they were used.

The Fail-Safe point is different for each group," General Bogan explained. "They also change from day to day. This is a fixed point in the sky where the planes will orbit until they get a positive order to go in. Without it they must return to the United States. This is called Positive Control.

The world is no longer man's theatre. Man has been made into a helpless spectator. The two evil forces he has created- science and the state- have combined into one monstrous body. We're at the mercy of our monster...

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don't see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.

Impersonal things that dominate our time and imagination offer extravagant promises of control and knowledge. But they also squeeze all sense of mystery and wonder and reverence out of our lives.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image.

It's the set of the sail, and not the gale that determines the way they go.

The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory. Post-Eden

When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them "in their place." The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.

He tells the sun, 'Don't shine,' and it doesn't; he pulls the blinds on the stars.

Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray.

I'm in charge of all this—I run this universe!

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.

I got interested in computers and how they could be enslaved to the megalomaniac impulses of a teenager.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Caretaking, she suggests, is not an inherent threat to liberty. "From a feminist, caring framework," Peterson writes, "liberty is not defined as complete separation and independence from the parent." If fathering still reminds us of oppressive control, mothering might help us imagine relationships based not just on power, but also care.

Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired, like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

I'm afraid something will happen to my hands," he says, "I need my hands.

He is someone who believes he can break things, or he believes that anything can hurt him.

Circumstances rule men and not men rule circumstances.

Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.