Control Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Unless you are prepared to give up something valuable you will never be able to truly change at all, because you'll be forever in the control of things you can't give up.

What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love. It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.

Doubtless, it shews the wisdom of God, to have so fram'd things at first, that there can seldom or never need any extraordinary interposition of his power; or the employing from, time to time, an intelligent overseer, to regulate, assist, and control the motions of matter.

Though they control scores of industrial, commercial, mining and tourist corporations, not one bears the name Rothschild. Being private partnerships, the family houses never need to, and never do, publish a single public balance sheet, or any other report of their financial condition.

Frederic Morton

People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us can come to being happy.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

The secret to perseverance is a simple one: have a bigger commitment to getting the job done than to attempting to control your inner feelings and sensations.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the "failure" of philanthropy, but rather at its success.

Margaret Sanger

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.

I understand why other people would want to stay in B&Bs. They're pretty. They're personal. They're quaint, a polite way of saying no TV. They are romantic, i. e., every object large enough for a flower to be printed on it is going to have a flower printed on it. They're cozy, meaning that a guest has to keep her belongings on the floor because every conceivable flat surface is covered in knickknacks, except for the one knickknack she longs for, a remote control.

Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate, especially those of us who do not share Shaw's curious admiration for dictators.

J. B. Priestley

It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies- it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their newspapers. There was no way to control it.

GUN CONTROL! That is what the Branch Davidian compound attack was all about. David Koresh was a gun collector and a tax evader. Boy, they didn't like him, and one of the purposes for that raid was to scare the American people into submission. You better register your firearms. Make sure they know. They might come for you as they did for Koresh.

The truth is you and I are in control of only two things - how we prepare for what might happen and how we respond to what just happened. The moment when things actually do happen belongs to God.

Abortion should never be used as a method of birth control, but the consequences of making it a black market procedure are too high. My stance is that it should be Safe, Legal, Rare and Privately Funded.

Let me be clear. Last I was aware you were neither my husband nor my father nor my King. Therefore, any control you may imagine you hold over me is just that- imaginary

When I see a man's wife listening to his campaign speech I always admire the self-control that keeps her from laughing.

Philander Chase Johnson

As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.

It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?

... It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.

Kingdom Authority is the God-given mandate of Christians to exercise control over the world in the name of Jesus and under His oversight.

"Giving it away helps defuse complex intellectual property issues of ownership and control that can distract the universities from their missions to disseminate knowledge." - commmenting on MIT's Open Courseware program

Americans have a special horror of giving up control, of letting things happen in their own way without interference.

William S. Burroughs

People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.'... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.

Martha Gellhorn

The classical Greek philosophers, Aristotle and Plato, established some important systems ideas. Aristotle reasoned that the parts of the body only make sense in terms of the way they function to support the whole organism and used this biological analogy to consider how individuals need to be related to the State. Plato was interested in how the notion of control, or the art of steersmanship (kybernetes), could be applied both to vessels and the State. Ships had to be steered safely toward harbour by a helmsman. A similar role needed to be followed in societies if they were to prosper.

Michael C. Jackson

And yet as a coach, I know that being fixated on winning (or more likely, not losing) is counterproductive, especially when it causes you to lose control of your emotions. What's more, obsessing about winning is a loser's game: The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome. The ride is a lot more fun that way.