Control Quotes

I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

Authority is something from which we are constantly subtracting, of which there remains always a residue, and which we attempt to make smaller and smaller.

For years, we've been bludgeoned with the cliche "information is power." But information isn't power. After all, who's got the most information in your neighborhood? Librarians. And they're famous for having no power at all. And who has the most power in your community? Politicians. And they're notorious for being ill-informed.

My grandmother was, back when they called them 'stewardesses,' a flight attendant. I actually had a ball wearing that little uniform and making sure everything was under control.

When you introduce something new to a country, you want to do it right. Generally, that means you have to do it yourself.

Either you run the day or the day runs you.

The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.

He who has the greatest power put into his hands will only become the more impatient of any restraint in the use of it.

In a calm sea every man is a pilot.

You don’t have a staff General, you have a court.

Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.

Power without authority is tyranny.

The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there is the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, … he’s sure he can control the demon. But it doesn’t work out.

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

This vermin must be destroyed. The Jews are our sworn enemies, and at the end of this year there will not be a Jew left in Germany. Neither the French, nor the Americans, nor the English are responsible for the difficulties in our relations with Paris, London, or Washington. Those responsible are the Jews. We will give similar advice to Rumania, Hungary, etc.... Germany will seek to form a bloc of anti-Semitic States, as she would not be able to treat as friends the States in which the Jews, either through their economic activity or through their high positions, could exercise any kind of influence.

I love order. It's my dream. A world where all would be silent and still, and each thing in its last place, under the last dust.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I’ve learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one’s reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one’s master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person’s view requires to be faked…The man who lies to the world, is the world’s slave from then on…There are no white lies, there is only the blackest of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all.

They would make fine servants .... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.