583 Control Quotes

'Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the 'given' material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control.'

Imbued with the desire to secure for the German people the great religious, moral, and cultural values rooted in the two Christian Confessions, we have abolished the political organizations but strengthened the religious institutions.

We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases.

It's like you wanting to marry Miss World and she doesn't want you, what can I do about it? I can try to help you, but if she does not want to marry you what can I do?

You are what you eat, but eventually you become what eats you.

Aggression is simply another name for government. Aggression, invasion, government, are interconvertible terms. The essence of government is control, or the attempt to control. He who attempts to control another is a governor, an aggressor, an invader; and the nature of such invasion is not changed, whether it is made by one man upon another man, after the manner of the ordinary criminal, or by one man upon all other men, after the manner of an absolute monarch, or by all other men upon one man, after the manner of a modern democracy.

Reason is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative one.

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

The possession of anything begins in the mind.

It was a good thing to have a couple of thousand people all rigid and frozen together, in the palm of one's hand.

I will have you removed if you don't stop. I have a little system of my own.

A baby is born into this world in a state of fear. Total paranoia and awareness. He sees the world with eyes not used yet. As he grows up, his parents lay all this stuff on him. They tell him, when they should be letting him tell them. Let the children lead you.

But in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember that his country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.

I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

There are things I can't force. I must adjust. There are times when the greatest change needed is a change of my viewpoint.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we - we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.

All mass movements avail themselves of action as a means of unification. The conflicts a mass movement seeks and incites serve not only to down its enemies but also to strip its followers of their distinct individuality and render them more soluble in the collective medium.

Freedom means freedom from forces and circumstances which would turn man into a thing, which would impose on man the passivity and predictability of matter. By this test, absolute power is the manifestation most inimical to human uniqueness. Absolute power wants to turn people into malleable clay.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart.

There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother's keeper will end up by being his jail-keeper.

Those in possession of absolute power can not only prophesy and make their prophecies come true, but they can also lie and make their lies come true.

I can die when I wish to: that is my elixir of life.

Oppression is the essence of power.

First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.

Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane... There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions.

There's no such thing as advice to the lovelorn. If they took advice, they wouldn't be lovelorn. You see, advice and lovelorn don't go together. Because advice makes love sound like some sort of cognitive activity, but we know that it isn't. We all know that it's some sort of horrible chemical reaction over which we have absolutely no control. And that's why advice doesn't work.

Chiefly the mold of a man's fortune is in his own hands.

How shall I be able to rule over others, that have not full power and command of myself?

The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that this is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash.

Life is a thread that someone entangled.

L'homme croit souvent se conduire lorsqu'il est conduit; et pendant que par son esprit il tend a un but, son coeur l'entraine insensiblement a un autre.

Dumb academicians cannot comprehend their slavery to counterfeit word and its evil. Word enslaves mind. Talking dog could enslave humanity. Teachers enslave you stupid.

I don't know why nobody told you how to unfold your love I don't know how someone controlled you They bought and sold you.

I'll play what you want or I won't play at all.

Hold'em by the nose and kick'em in the pants.

The blind conviction that we have to do something about other people's reproductive behaviour, and that we may have to do it whether they like it or not, derives from the assumption that the world belongs to us, who have so expertly depleted its resources, rather than to them, who have not.

Groucho Marx is the only actor I ever allowed to ad-lib in a show I wrote. That was because I couldn't stop him.

Government is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, 'See, if it weren't for the government, you wouldn't be able to walk.'

A little government involvement is just as dangerous as a lot - because the first leads inevitably to the second.

Democratic politicians want to solve the crisis of poor education by taking more of your money and using it to reduce classroom sizes in the government schools. Republican politicians want to solve the crisis by taking more of your money to provide vouchers to a handful of the poorest students in each area, paying for a part of the tuition expense at private schools. But before long this 'reform' would make those private schools indistinguishable from the government schools ... Vouchers are an excellent way for the government to increase control over private schools.

Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free.

[I'm] an extremely private dude and all this is happening so damn quick. I really haven't had any time to rationalize it. But it's nothing that I'm going to let freak me out or take control of me or my thoughts or my real life.

The challenge was to capture the stillness of him. I have kind of semi-frantic, nervous energy. Harnessing that was something I thought I'd have to work out. Shooting in the wilderness, the stillness became like this innate quality.

We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.

'What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.'

The guardians who have kindly undertaken the supervision will see to it that by far the largest part of mankind, including the entire 'beautiful sex,' should consider the step into maturity, not only as difficult but as very dangerous. After having made their domestic animals dumb and having carefully prevented these quiet creatures from daring to take any step beyond the lead-strings to which they have fastened them, these guardians then show them the danger which threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants.... The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken.

I don't work from drawings or colour sketches... I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them... I can control the flow of paint, there is no accident, just as there is no beginning or no end.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.

Derriere un voile, invisible et presente, J'etais de ce grand corps l'ame toute-puissante.

Everything that emancipates the spirit without giving us control over ourselves is harmful.

I can never consent to being dictated to.

I have been placed under surveillance, and I can't take a step without it being known to the Polish minister of internal affairs.

In fact, Mr. Watson, it's a queer world, and the longer I live in it the queerer I find it. Once I thought it would be a good idea to regulate things myself and run the world as it ought to be run; but I gave it up long ago. The world's a stage, they say; but the show ain't always amusing, by a long chalk, and sometimes I wish I didn't have a reserved seat.

In arguing for increasing content owners' control over content users, it's not sufficient to say 'They didn't pay for this use.'

There has never been a time in history when more of our 'culture' was as 'owned' as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.

The danger in media concentration comes not from the concentration, but instead from the feudalism that this concentration, tied to the change in copyright, produces. It is not just that there are a few powerful companies that control an ever expanding slice of the media. It is that this concentration can call upon an equally bloated range of rights - property rights of a historically extreme form - that makes their bigness bad.

Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control, It begins with your family, and soon it comes round to your soul. Well I've been where you're hanging, I think I can see how you're pinned: When you're not feeling holy your loneliness says that you've sinned.

I want to seize fate by the throat.

Give a man a free hand and he'll run it all over you.[6]

And Bormann, who has not accepted our invitation to this reunion, sat at the throttle of the vast and powerful engine of the party, guiding it in the ruthless execution of Nazi policies, from the scourging of the Christian church to the lynching of captive Allied airmen. . . .

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Wise anger is like fire from a flint: there is great ado to get it out; and when it does come, it is out again immediately.

Not being able to govern events, I govern myself.

One of those leaders of what they call the social revolution has said that religion is the opiate of the people. Opium...opium...opium, yes. Let us give them opium so that they can sleep and dream.

I may have had many projects, but I never was free to carry out any of them. It did me little good to be holding the helm; no matter how strong my hands, the sudden and numerous waves were stronger still, and I was wise enough to yield to them rather than resist them obstinately and make the ship founder. Thus I never was truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.

Fanaticism must first be lulled, in order that it may be eradicated.

I can no longer obey; I have tasted command, and I cannot give it up.

If you want a thing done well, do it yourself.

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

Power is my mistress. I have worked too hard at her conquest to allow anyone to take her away from me.

Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemies.

The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.

Self-disciplined begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward.

The people resemble a wild beast, which, naturally fierce and accustomed to live in the woods, has been brought up, as it were, in a prison and in servitude, and having by accident got its liberty, not being accustomed to search for its food, and not knowing where to conceal itself, easily becomes the prey of the first who seeks to incarcerate it again.

Turn that thing off, its driving me mad!

He trusted neither of them as far as he could spit, and he was a poor spitter, lacking both distance and control.

La pintura es mas fuerte que yo, siempre consigue que haga lo que ella quiere.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

A man who is 'of sound mind' is one who keeps the inner madman under lock and key.

Chinese are wise in comprehending without many words what is inevitable and inescapable and therefore only to be borne.

'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' the manager said. 'Mountains, Bruce, mountains,' Bruce said and gazed. 'Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia,' the manager said. 'Echolalia, Bruce-' 'Okay, Bruce,' the manager said, and shut the cabin door behind him, thinking, I believe I'll put him among the carrots. Or beets. Something simple. Something that won't puzzle him.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

It was evident to Elias Tate that this was the government. First they shake hands with you, he thought, and then they murder you.

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to place their entire life in the hands of some other person. For this purpose they frequently choose someone who doesn't even want the beastly thing.

The will-to-live becomes the will-to-power.

Except our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power.

Dictators must have enemies. They must have internal enemies to justify their secret police and external enemies to justify their military forces.