Quotes About Control

As they held hands through the bars, Dias spied a black beetle burrowing through the wood of the jail. It made a horrid clacking sound. It was said there was no way to stop this beetle's ticking off the hours of a person's life, but Samuel Dias had never heard of a deathwatch beetle. He went over and stomped on it with his boot, crushing it completely

The rich can get whatever they want put into the papers.

As soon as he is regarded as a possession for which one has a particular goal, as soon as one exerts control over him, his natural growth will be violently interrupted.

Oppression and the forcing of submission do not begin in the office, factory, or political party; they begin in the very first weeks of an infant's life. Afterward they are repressed and are then, because of their very nature, inaccessible to argument. Nothing changes in the character of submission or dependency, when it is only their object that is changed.

If an adult has not developed and mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of the authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem to threatening to him.

They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency actively fosters the hatred that, though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless.

We only hate as long as we feel totally powerless.

People brought up cruelly (and unfortunately that is still the majority) willingly submit to dictators and cheer them on when they supply them with an enemy they can execrate.

Their access to the emotional world of their own childhood, however, is impaired—characterized by a lack of respect, a compulsion to control and manipulate, and a demand for achievement. Very often they show disdain and irony, even derision and cynicism, for the child they were. In general, there is a complete absence of real emotional understanding or serious appreciation of their own childhood vicissitudes, and no conception of their true needs—beyond the desire for achievement.

Isn't it true that all the people I know in the world so far are hardly more than puppets for me, serving the glossy contrivings of my imagination?

What I think was hardest for me to realize was that he had tried each time to stop himself. He had killed animals, taking lesser lives to keep from killing a child

Hold still, my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

Len estaba a punto de decir algo; mi madre lo vio abrir los labios, y cerró los ojos y ordenó al mundo que callara, gritando las palabras dentro de su cabeza.

Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.

Those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us.

Perhaps this is simply the way it is with writers. It's when they don't see you that you matter. Because then you can belong to them in a way that permits them complete possession. You are determined by them. You are controlled. You are, generally speaking, exaggerated.

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking that they don't have any.

All he think about since us married is how to make me mind. He don't want a wife, he want a dog. (Walker 2000: 58)

When Pa tell you to do something, you do it, he say. When he say not to, you don't. You don't do what he say, he beat you. Sometime beat me anyhow, I say, whether I do what he say or not. That's right, say Harpo. But not Sofia. She do what she want, don't pay me no mind at all. I try to beat her, she black my eyes. Oh, boo-hoo, he cry. Boo-hoo-hoo.

Can you handle it? ast Shug. How I'm gon keep from killing him, I say.

I'm getting tired of Harpo, she say. All he think about since us married is how to make me mind. He don't want a wife, he want a dog.

So he bought her a car, only he refuse to show her how to drive it.

This, then, was the power people like us had. The power to enslave others and to frustrate their dreams.

and it is interesting to see today that mothers and fathers are returning to the old way of only visiting each other and not wanting to live together. This is the pattern of freedom until man no longer wishes to dominate women and children or always have to prove his control.