Selected control quotes

1. When you're dancing the mystical dance of the molecules, you're not the one who's leading.

2. '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.'

3. This is The Rock's show! This is SmackDown!

4. Let's stop somebody from doing something! Everybody does too much.

5. 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.

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

7. What luck for rulers that men do not think.

8. We're all puppets, Laurie. I'm just a puppet who can see the strings.

9. Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

10. 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?

11. There is a world which I alone rule, but it ends at my fingertips.

12. Why am I so often at the mercy of those who don't deserve to control my life?

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

14. 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.

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

16. Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

17. The possession of anything begins in the mind.

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

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

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

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

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

25. 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.

26. 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.

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

28. 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.

29. 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.

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

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

32. 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.

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

34. Oppression is the essence of power.

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

36. 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.

37. 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.

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

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

40. 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.

41. Any attempt to codify musical reality into a kind of imitation grammar (I refer mainly to the efforts associated with the Twelve-Tone System) is a brand of fetishism which shares with Fascism and racism the tendency to reduce live processes to immobile, labeled objects, the tendency to deal with formalities rather than substance. Claude Levi-Strauss describes (though to illustrate a different point) a captain at sea, his ship reduced to a frail raft without sails, who, by enforcing a meticulous protocol on his crew, is able to distract them from nostalgia for a safe harbor and from the desire for a destination.

42. Mind is the root of all sensuality.

43. Who can say thus far, no further to the tide of his nature?

44. Newspaper press is a great power, but just as an unchained torrent of water submerges whole country sides and devastates crops, even so an uncontrolled pen serves but to destroy.

45. We, in some unknown Power's employ, Move on a rigorous line; Can neither, when we will, enjoy, Nor, when we will, resign.

46. Yet they, believe me, who await No gifts from Chance, have conquer'd Fate.

47. Be to her virtues very kind; Be to her faults a little blind; Let all her ways be unconfined; And clap your padlock - on her mind!

48. Please excuse me if I get an erection. Pardon me if I don't.

49. When the fight comes, always endeavour to chase the enemy around to your left side. Chase him towards awkward places, and try to keep him with his back to awkward places. When the enemy gets into an inconvenient position, do not let him look around, but conscientiously chase him around and pin him down. In houses, chase the enemy into the thresholds, lintels, doors, verandas, pillars, and so on, again not letting him see his situation. Always chase the enemy into bad footholds, obstacles at the side, and so on, using the virtues of the place to establish predominant positions from which to fight. You must research and train diligently in this.

50. I fell in love with the whole ritual. The lights going down, the curtain going up, telling a story to a large group of people in the dark. It was one of those moments where you think, 'I can do that.' You're in control on stage. And I love telling the whole story in one fell swoop. With movies, you never think, 'I nailed it.' In theater you get to go back and do it again, which to me is much more satisfying.

51. When I was very young, somebody - maybe it was a squirrel, they talk so much, or a magpie, or maybe a fishie - told me that Pan owned all this forest. Well, not owned owned. Not like he would sell the forest to someone else, or put a wall all around it ... It's not hard to own something. Or everything. You just have to know that it's yours, and then be willing to let it go.

52. Don't you worry about the foreign minister. The foreign minister will do anything I tell him. If I say: 'take down your trousers and sit with your bare bottom on a block of ice', Gromyko will do so until further notice.

53. Historians are the most powerful and dangerous members of any society. They must be watched carefully... They can spoil everything.

54. I subdue matter and force it to become my mind's good medium. I rejoice in plants, in animals, in man and in gods, as though they were my children. I feel all the universe nestling about me and following me as though it were my own body.

55. Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that's not called stability.

56. The US-UK would, doubtless, be as eager to draw their troops down in Iraq as Hitler was in occupied France and Norway, and the Russians were in Eastern Europe. And on the same condition. That local authorities will be able to ensure order and obedience to the master.

57. How could he not know that children had minds of their own, and resisted taming?

58. I know something of how he feels. I know something of having to submerge your will in someone else's. To live for them, as if they were the star of the story of your life, and you merely a supporting player. I have been a slave. But at least in all that time I knew my own heart. I knew what I truly thought even as I did what they wanted, whatever it took to get what I wanted from them.

59. You'd think she'd learn something from that. But she still does the same thing. Making decisions that deform other people's lives, without consulting them, without ever conceiving that perhaps they don't want her to save them from whatever supposed misery she's saving them from.

60. Petra,' said Rackham, 'don't you understand that we love you children? All of you? We already had to send Ender away. We're sending them all away, except for you. Because we love you. Because we don't want any harm to you.

61. It all spoke of the willingness of people to hurt each other, the burning passion to control what other people thought and did. So many people, in secret, subtle ways, acted to destroy people - and not just their enemies, either, but also their friends. Destroying them for the pleasure of knowing that they had the power to cause pain. And so few who devoted their lived to building other peoples strength and confidence. So few who were true teachers, genuine mates.

62. How does he do it? How does he master people without bluster or bullying? How does he make people fear him or love him, not in spite of his ruthlessness but because of it?

63. If you don't want to control what I think, why did you raise your voice? Why did you argue with me at all?

64. So if the evil he had done wasn't the death of the roaches, what was it? The power he had? His knack for making things go just where he wanted, making them break just in the right place, understanding how things ought to be and helping them get that way?

65. Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them. Then again, what women didn't want to decide that?

66. As long as my body did their bidding, what did it matter what I thought?

67. She thinks it's all better now, Josif thought bitterly. She thinks she's kept me. She would have kept me better if she had let me go now.

68. I was sad to see you go Anywhere. To anyone. I was yours, is that it? I had to love you most, is that it? If I thought of the songhouse as home, you couldn't bear that, could you? If I love the songhouse more than I loved this palace, then you'd take away the songhouse from me, wouldn't you? Only you had to twist it, so I'd hate them in the process, and not you at all. You couldn't have me hate you. I wanted your songs You wanted my songs more than you wanted my happiness. So you took my happiness, and stole my songs.

69. I thought that when I trusted you, that meant you would always act the way I wanted you to.

70. Tell Turner to keep his goddamned Crayolas away from my film!

71. The conglomerate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned they have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people - how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no?

72. And he won't follow. These lines he's drawn for him and he don't want to try. Seeing is believing Lord knows what he sees here every night. ~ 'Murray'

73. Faites votre devoir, et laissez faire aux dieux.

74. Okay, for the next 20 minutes, that office, is mine.

75. A church is either structured for growth or control.

76. If we have to sacrifice and renounce things, we may do so in the full knowledge of the reasons and in the hope of a wonderful future to which we thereby acquire a right; what we cannot bear is that such sacrifices and deprivations should be imposed arbitrarily by an enemy, as a punishment.

77. Those not able to work were marched to the farmhouses. These were a good kilometer from the side track. There they were made to undress. At first they had to undress in the open, where we had erected walls made of straw and branches of trees that kept them from onlookers. After a while we built barracks. We had big signs, all of which read 'To Disinfection' or 'Baths.' That was in order to give the people the impression that they would merely receive a bath or be disinfected, in order not to have any technical difficulty in the extermination processes.

78. Keep them separated and interrogate them.

79. Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star In his steep course?

80. You are only a puppet. But you don't realize that you are.

81. Bella Swan: Alice, don't you think this is just a bit controlling? Just a little bit psychotic, maybe?

82. The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country. Not so long ago this used to be freely said in parliament, even about the educational system of the black people. It is still said even today, although in a much more sophisticated language. To a large extent the evil-doers have succeeded in producing at the output end of their machine a kind of black man who is man only in form. This is the extent to which the process of dehumanization has advanced.

83. If you did not suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are.

84. I took that horrible novel back to the library - yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I cannot control the output of diseased minds or people who cater to them - BUT I WON'T ALLOW SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!

85. 'Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action - its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money's sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power.'

86. Why doth IT so and so, and ever so, This viewless, voiceless Turner of the Wheel?

87. Easy, Mr. Pendleton. Easy. Good to have your dander up, but it's discipline that wins the day.

88. Be not disturbed at trifles, nor at accidents, common or unavoidable.

89. Nearly all of it is now called in by the banks, who have the regulation of the safety-valves of our fortunes, and who condense and explode them at their will.

90. It's good to be king and have your own way, get a feeling of peace at the end of the day.

91. Alexander: How the world must have been changing while I was holding it still.

92. It will enable a Labour Government to do all they want under Labour's Programme for Britain...It will give us the powers to control all the oil companies, all the multinationals, to fix their prices and their distribution systems.

93. All the emphasis on crime and drugs and pornography used to justify the supression of the Internet is really aimed at supressing knowledge of the radical political alternatives that are now available.

94. You have got to stop seeing yourself as a victim, take control and take responsibility.

95. Regulate my area, the terror I represent/Makin yo' people disappear, you wonderin where they went?

96. The impulses which flow in the arm nerves of a typist convey to her fingers the translated information which reaches her eye or ear, in order that the fingers may be caused to strike the proper keys. Might not these currents be intercepted, either in the original form in which information is conveyed to the brain, or in the marvelously metamorphosed form in which they then proceed to the hand?

97. 'I created Hulkamania. And I will destroy it'

98. 'You don't cross the boss.'

99. 'Nobody says no to Vince McMahon! Nobody! Not you, not them or anyone! It's in your contract!'

100. 'That woman should of been put on the pill!'