control

I stayed in therapy long enough to know that nothing that happened to me was my fault. I didn't do anything to invite it or deserve it. But that just makes it worse. Maybe I don't blame myself for what happened, but when they tell you that something was completely and utterly random, they're also telling you something else. That nothing you do matters. It doesn't matter if you do everything right, if you dress the right way and act the right way and follow all the rules, because evil will find you anyway. Evil's resourceful that way. ... They tell you it was random to make you feel blameless. But all I hear them telling me is that I have no control, and if I have no control, then I'm powerless. I would have preferred being blamed.

God the Father and the Son don__ wish you to remain blind. It is men that put blindness upon other people for the purpose of control and manipulation.

If you work your hardest and you do your best, then the rest is not in your control, but in God's Hands.

I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. [The World Is My Home (1991)]

If you work your hardest, and you do your best, then the rest is not in your control, but in God's Hands.

You can change only what people know, not what they do.

That was what finally decided me. I wanted to be near him, to touch him, but what I really wanted more than that was answers, for the conflict within me to end. I needed control.

We think we can control our lives, but our lives control us. And everything that touches our lives controls us. People have less power than they think they do. It's just the reactions we control.

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__f 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?

So when you__e nervous, you count?_ __ot just when I__ nervous,_ I said. __t___ all the time. I count the seconds during pauses in conversations. I count the minutes when I__ waiting on something. Sometimes, when I__ kind of panicked or anxious, I count my heartbeats. Something about counting makes me feel like_ like I have the power. Like knowing how much time has passed or how many steps I__e taken from one place to another will somehow keep me in control of the situation.

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. I mean that mirage of dominion over our own life that allows us to feel like adults, for we associate maturity with autonomy, the sovereign right to determine what is going to happen to us next. Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn__ miss an appointment, it never has.

Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.

You are in control only if you control yourself.

If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.

Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.

Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress

The best way to navigate through life is to give up all of our controls.

God is in control in every circumstance.