Quotes About Control

At any point in your career, you are either a thermostat or a thermometer.

Defining freedom in different ways (reducing expectations, increasing sources of income so no one source controls you).

Most people obsess on regrets in their past or anxieties in their future. I call this "time-travelling". The past and future don't exist. They are memories and speculation, neither of which you have any control over. You don't need to time travel anymore. You can live right now.

Nothing ever works out when you are at the whims of others. It doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur or an employee. Once someone is bribing you to do something (a salary is a form of bribery if you are only doing the work for the money and not for the meaning) then you become a prisoner.

The only thing you have control over is your mindset, your habits, and the choices you make internally about how you're going to deal with a situation.

Panic freezes you. Nobody is going to go into your head and take the panic away. But action leaks the panic out of your head.

At any point in your career, you are either a thermostat or a thermometer. You either define the temperature of the people around you and help them achieve their goals and dreams, or you simply do as you're told and be a follower and never inspire. How do you become the thermostat?

Nobody wants to feel powerless. If the negotiation is not going your way you can say to them, 'Sounds like there's nothing you can do.' "This will make them feel powerless. They will say 'no' to that and now they will try to do something for you to prove they are not powerless.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. When everyone spills their guts, they lose their sight. The one who holds on to this very precious resource becomes the one-eyed man, the king.

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

They knew that no one heard, that bloodless people cannot be made to bleed. So they blew what everyone had heard before, they reassured everyone that nothing terrible was happening.

But the policemen were doing nothing now. Obviously, this was not because they had become more human but because they were under orders and because they were afraid. And indeed they were, and I was delighted to see it. There they stood, in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club or a fist or a gun.

Ah! she said, men may be at the mercy of women?I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them. But if a particular man is ever at the mercy of a particular woman ?why, he's somehow stopped being a man.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.

A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State.

He was suggesting that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to the white world and the relationship, not a whit less painful or dangerous, in which they stood to each other. He was suggesting that in the acceptance of this duality lay their strength, that in this, precisely, lay their means of defining and controlling the world in which they lived.

It is very frightening to belong to somebody.

People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.

I had discovered, through ugly experience, what they were like when they held the power and what they were like when you held the power.

That summer, in any case, all the fears with which I had grown up, and which were now a part of me and controlled my vision of the world, rose up like a wall between the world and me, and drove me into the church.

They had the judges, the juries, the shotguns, the law—in a word, power.

We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster.

And yet power is real, and many things, including, very often, love, cannot be achieved without it.