Quotes about Control

Life is like a race track. When you go through it it may feel like you are being thrown around little bit, but if you don't resist it, but still control what is happening you will be fine. Just remember to take a pitstop now and then.

Surrendering completely to love, be it human or divine, means giving up everything, including our own well-being or our ability to make decisions.  It means loving in the deepest sense of the word.  The truth is that we don't want to be saved in the way God has chosen; we want to keep absolute control over our every step, to be fully conscious of our decisions, to be capable of choosing the object of our devotion.

The rich nations of the world are acting like ancient usurers, lending money to the desperate poor on terms that cannot possibly be met and, thus, steadily acquiring more and more control over the lives and assets of the poor.

"Property" is not simply some social invention, like Emily Post’s guide to etiquette, but a way of describing conditions that are essential to all living things. Every living thing must occupy space and consume energy from outside itself if it is to survive, and it must do so to the exclusion of all other living things on the planet. I didn’t dream this up. My thinking was not consulted before the life system developed. The world was operating on the property principle when I arrived and, like the rest of us, I had to work out my answers to that most fundamental, pragmatic of all social questions: who gets to make decisions about what? The essence of "ownership" is to be found in control: who gets to be the ultimate decision maker about people and "things" in the world?

Life is a continuing process of making adjustments and creative responses in a world too complex to be predictable. But institutions insist not only upon their illusions of predictability, but their systems of control by which they imagine they can direct the world to their ends. This is why institutions have always aligned themselves with the forces of power, in order to compel the rest of nature – particularly mankind – to conform to their interests.

Because we are self-controlling beings, we are also responsible for our actions. This is not a moral or ethical proposition, but simply a causal one: I am responsible for what I do because I am the one who controls my actions. By the same token, to the degree we seek to control the lives and property of others, we help to foster, in their minds, the illusions that they are not responsible for what they do.

If it is our desire to live as free men and women, we must abandon our habits of looking outside ourselves for answers. It is to our own minds, our own fears, to which we must have resort. To be "free" is to live without division, and yet the state – as well as other proclaimed authorities – insist that we obey their mandates. To the extent that we must choose between pursuing our own interests and obeying others, we are internally divided into conflicting purposes.

How do we end such divisive thinking other than by confronting, and ending, the contradictory thinking that has produced it? Can we understand that trying to overthrow the state, or to reform it, or to select less-demanding leaders, will not end the thinking that has produced it? Neither is the answer to be found in science fiction or utopian/dystopian novels, in which efforts are made to deal with freedom in the setting of imaginary worlds, thus relieving the reader of the responsibility of doing so in reality.

It is the existential depths of our own beings that we need to explore if we are to discover the meaning of freedom. When we are prepared to do so, we will begin to discover some important truths about ourselves, one of the most important being that we are, by nature, self-controlling beings. I, alone, can energize my will and my body on behalf of purposes to which I must choose to act. The fact that political systems must resort to violence – and the threat of violence – to persuade us to obey their directives, is the clearest evidence that neither they, nor anyone else, can control our actions.

Real meditation is not about mastering a technique; it's about letting go of control.

Spiritual people can be some of the most violent people you will ever meet. Mostly, they are violent to themselves. They violently try to control their minds, their emotions, and their bodies. They become upset with themselves and beat themselves up for not rising up to the conditioned mind's idea of what it believes enlightenment to be. No one ever became free through such violence. Why is it that so few people are truly free? Because they try to conform to ideas, concepts, and beliefs in their heads. They try to concentrate their way to heaven. But freedom is about the natural state, the spontaneous and un-self-conscious expression of beingness. If you want to find it, see that the very idea of "a someone who is in control" is a concept created by the mind. Take one step backward into the unknown.

Stop complaining. Take charge of your life. You need to control the mind and the senses - sharp, alert, awake. Focus your life on God by getting control of your senses. That loss of control of your senses means that you're not going to God. You control your mind with intelligence. Use your brain for control. Hardly anybody is controlling their mind and their emotions, hardly anybody. And because of this, most people are in chaos in one way or another in their lives.

Practice (...) meditation while you are on the phone; for the entire time that you are on the phone, no matter who you are talking to, regardless or your like or dislike of them, you remain 100 percent in control of your being - which you can only do by controlling your emotions. Do it in a really attentive way. Don't chatter and communicate about anything unimportant. Remember to be constantly listening to everyone you are talking to; listen to the tone of their voice; be in a calm, peaceful, and controlled state. Bring a meditative state and consciousness into your life 24 hours a day, so that you will want to do this meditation for the pleasure it brings.

Perhaps the highest human potential is only realized when we no longer require the world to conform to our fantasies of how it should be.

No matter how famous the victim, no matter how powerful the advocates, it simply isn't always possible to control the conduct of other people.

I don't like being watched. I hate punch cards and flex time.  I'm allergic to cross-referenced lists.  I detest passport control and birth certificates.  Obligatory school attendance, mandatory disclosure of information, legally required financial support, legal liability, oaths of confidentiality - the whole rotten monstrosity of government controls and demands that fall on your head when you come to Denmark.

The ingenuity of the average worker is sufficient to outwit any system of controls devised by management.

In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something, maybe. Probably not.

People have to be responsible for their thoughts, so they have to learn to control them. It may not be easy, but it can be done.

To defeat a bully, you must take all aspects of control away from him.

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself.

In complete control,
Pretending control,
With dignified authority,
We are charlatans…

(Or maybe just a goat's-hair brush in a painter's hand.)
We have no idea what we are.

You can own silver and gold but never any fiat currency issued by someone else. 

The idea that we are “stewards of the earth” is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body’s physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? . . . Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries? . . . We are unconscious of most of our body’s processes, thank goodness, because we’d screw it up if we weren’t. The human body is so complex, with so many parts. . . . The idea that we are consciously caretaking such a large and mysterious system is ludicrous.

Always put yourself in a situation where you can control your circumstances!

"Most people live by their illusions. Never let mere appearances become your reality."

"The hardest thing you'll learn in this journey is to give up the illusion of controlling your own life"

You don't have to worry about what their vibration is if your vibration is one of connection. Because if your vibration is one of connection -- you're going to dominate the vibration. This is the way you learn your relationships. The thing that most people do not understand, is that you get to control the way you feel, because you get to choose the thoughts you think. Most people think that they only have the option of responding to the circumstances that surround them. And that's what makes them attempt the impossible, which is to control the circumstances around them, which only feeds their feeling of frustration and vulnerability, because it doesn't take very much life experience to discover you can't control all of those circumstances. But you can control your vibration. And when you control your vibration, you've controlled everything that has anything to do with you. 

"Man has got to take charge of Man....

Then real education, including pre-natal education.  By real education I mean one that has no 'take-it-or-leave-it' nonsense.  A real education makes the patient what it wants infallibly:  whatever he or his parents try to do about it.  Of course, it'll have to be mainly psychological at first. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning int he end and direct manipulation of the brain...." -Lord Feverstone

The kind of violence one should fear is always quiet and comes all wrapped up in words like Love until you live with it daily and you value only that which is valuable to the violator.

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-ridden, regulated, penned up, indoctrinated, preached at, checked, appraised, seized, censured, commanded, by beings who have neither title, nor knowledge, nor virtue. To be governed is to have every operation, every transaction, every movement noted, registered, counted, rated, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, refused, authorized, endorsed, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.

To be governed is, under pretext of public utility and in the name of the general interest, to be laid under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, exhausted, hoaxed and robbed; then, upon the slightest resistance, at the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, annoyed, hunted down, pulled about, beaten, disarmed, bound, imprisoned, shot, judged, condemned, banished, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and, to crown all, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.