"maturity is only the control of one's imagination."
— Sidney Greenslate

"If you can't control your peanut butter, you can't expect to control your life."
— Bill Watterson (The Authoritative Calvin and Hobbes)

""Whoever controls the media, controls the mind" "
— Jim Morrison

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
— Noam Chomsky

"My life didn't please me, so I created my life."
— Coco Chanel

"Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. "
— James Frey (My Friend Leonard)

"Do you know we are being led to
Slaughters by placid admirals

& that fat slow generals are getting
Obscene on young blood

Do you know we are ruled by t.v.
"
— Jim Morrison (Jim Morrison's an American Prayer)

"No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you."
— Mark Helprin (Winter's Tale)

"Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existance is defined in terms of control."
— Terence McKenna

"The overman...Who has organized the chaos of his passions, given style to his character, and become creative. Aware of life's terrors, he affirms life without resentment. "
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"You can change only what people know, not what they do."
— Scott Adams (God's Debris: A Thought Experiment)

"Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it."
— David Richo (The Five Things We Cannot Change: And the Happiness We Find by Embracing Them)

"Among these temperamentally unhappy campers are "reactant" personalities, who focus on what they often wrongly perceive as others' attempts to control them. In one experiment, some of these touchy individuals were asked to think of two people they knew: a bossy sort who advocated hard work and a mellow type who preached la dolce vita. Then, one of the names was flashed before the subjects too briefly to register in their conscious awareness. Next, the subjects were given a task to perform. Those who had been exposed to the hard-driving name performed markedly worse than those exposed to the easygoing name. Even this weak, subliminal attention to an emotional cue that suggested control was enough to get their reactant backs up and cause them to act to their own disadvantage. All relationships involve give-and-take and cooperation, so a person who habitually attends to ordinary requests or suggestions like a bull to a red flag is in for big trouble in both home and workplace."
— Winifred Gallagher

"We've become a nation of wolves, ruled by sheep.
Owned by swine, overfed, and put to sleep.
While the media elite declare what to think,
I'll be wide awake, on the edge, and on the brink."
— Otep Shamaya

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be."
— Thomas à Kempis

"Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise."
— Philip Roth

"those who are afraid of freedom are those who cannot trust us to live in them. Trying to keep the law is actually a declaration of independence, a way of keeping control"
— William P. Young (The Shack)

"It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have osme semblance of control. But control was something I'd lost a long time ago."
— Nic Sheff

""It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have some semblance of control. But control was something I'd lost a long time ago." "
— Nic Sheff

"Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress"
— Steve Grand (Creation: Life and How to Make It)

"To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer."
— George Bernard Shaw

"It's funny, in a human kind of way, how we can convinces ourselves that we're in control at the very moment we are beginning to lose it. "
— William Cope Moyers

"You have no control over what the other guy does. You only have control over what you do."
— A. J. Kitt

"Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder—if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places?"
— Malcolm Margolin

"Your motivations--get that promotion, throw the best parties, run for public office--aren't impersonal abstractions but powerfully reflect who you are and what you focus on. An individual's goals figure prominently in the theories of personality first developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. According to his successor David McClelland, what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the will to power," which he considered the major driving force behind human behavior, is one of the three basic motivations, along with achievement and affiliation, that differentiate us as individuals.

A simple experiment show show these broad emotional motivations can affect what you pay attention to or ignore on very basic levels. When they examine images of faces that express different kinds of emotion, power-oriented subjects are drawn to nonconfrontational visages, such as "surprise faces," rather than to those that suggest dominance, as "anger faces" do. In contrast, people spurred by affiliation gravitate toward friendly or joyful faces."
— Winifred Gallagher (Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life)

"The money power preys on the nation in times of peace, and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war.It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes."
— Abraham Lincoln

"The central bank is an institution of the most deadly hostility existing against the Principles and form of our Constitution. I am an Enemy to all banks discounting bills or notes for anything but Coin. If the American People allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the People of all their Property until their Children will wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered. "
— Thomas Jefferson

"Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?"
— Alfred De Musset (Lorenzaccio)

"Foresight of phenomenon and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting their origin or inmost nature."
— John Stuart Mill (Auguste Comte and Positivism)

"It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse. "
— William P. Young (The Shack)

"The 'will to power and independence' has become so ubiquitous that it is now considered normal."
— William P. Young (The Shack)

"I should say here, because some in Washington like to dream up ways to control the Internet, that we don't need to 'control' free speech, we need to control ourselves."
— Peggy Noonan (Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now)