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.

There is a Destiny which has the control of our actions, not to be resisted by the strongest efforts of Human Nature.

It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made.

To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do.

I cannot command winds and weather.

If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it.

The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others.

Mankind will possess incalculable advantages and extraordinary control over human behavior when the scientific investigator will be able to subject his fellow men to the same external analysis he would employ for any natural object, and when the human mind will contemplate itself not from within but from without.

Physiology has, at last, gained control over the nerves which stimulate the gastric glands and the pancreas.

Now I am master of Shanghai.

A man who allows wild passion to arise within, himself burns his heart, then after burning adds the wind that thereto which ignites the fire again, or not, as the case may be.

Look at the forces against me. They don't want me out. They're afraid I'll cause trouble if I get out.

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master-gardener of his soul, the director of his life.

Right now, computers, which are supposed to be our servant, are oppressing us.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

People with real power never fear of losing it. People with control think of little else.

Not content to have the audience in the palm of his hand, he goes one further and clinches his fist.

I think vegetarians - for a lot of them - it's about a lack of commitment to life and relationships. There are some who just like the fact that they're controlling something in their life.

The Harvard Law states: Under controlled conditions of light, temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.

We are no longer puppets being manipulated by outside powerful forces: we become the powerful force ourselves.

Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.

The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.

Man proposes, and God disposes.

that which is impossible to force, it is impossible to hinder.

There's a line in the picture where he snarls, 'Nobody tells me what to do.' That's exactly how I've felt all my life.

I am not going to be dictated to by fans, certainly. I am dictated enough to by my record company to last me a million years.

I only direct in self-defense.

But I do think that women who spend all their lives on a diet probably have a miserable sex life: if your body is the enemy, how can you relax and take pleasure? Everything is about control, rather than relaxing, about holding everything in.

See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.

If you don't want a man unhappy politically, don't give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

History, in other words, is just a device to be used by well-paid boobherds to drive the American cattle in bovine content to their pastures or to the abattoir.

Nae man can tether time or tide.

My whole life has been decided by fate.

The ego is not master in its own house.

One might compare the relation of the ego to the id with that between a rider and his horse. The horse provides the locomotor energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it. But all too often in the relations between the ego and the id we find a picture of the less ideal situation in which the rider is obliged to guide his horse in the direction in which it itself wants to go.

Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window.

We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we find that. And this comes into every detail of our life.

Once killing starts, it is difficult to draw the line.

With self-discipline most anything is possible.

Any half-awake materialist well knows - that which you hold holds you.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

The paramount question of the day is not political, is not religious, but is economic. The crying-out demand of today is for a circle of principles that shall forever make it impossible for one man to control another by controlling the means of his existence.

You can't just let nature run wild.

Censors will try to censor a little bit more each year (because, like editors and other officious people, censors don't feel they are getting anywhere unless they are up and doing).

Women like not only to conquer, but to be conquered.

America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.

Communication must become total and conscious before we can stop it.

The man who said 'I'd rather be lucky than good' saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net and for a split second it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck it goes forward and you win. Or maybe it doesn't and you lose.

I believe we're responsible for everything that happens to us.

Madison Avenue is afraid of the dark.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols.... we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us.

In essence, if we want to direct our lives, we must take control of our consistent actions. It's not what we do once in a while that shapes our lives, but what we do consistently.

Take control of your consistent emotions and begin to consciously and deliberately reshape your daily experience of life.

The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you.

You must build your House of Parliament on the river: so... that the populace cannot exact their demands by sitting down round you.

My biggest problem is what to do about all the things I can't do anything about.

Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles.