Quotes About Control

Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything

Because citizens were always a bit like inmates and inmates were always a bit like citizens, so Consilience and Positron have only made it official.

It's foolish to joke with those who have absolute control over you. They don't like it; they think you don't appreciate the full extent of their power.

How tedious is a tyranny in the throes of enactment.

Change can be accommodated by any system depending on its rate, Crake used to say. Touch your head to a wall, nothing happens, but if the same head hits the wall at ninety miles an hour, it's red paint. We're in a speed tunnel, Jimmy. When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.

When the water's moving faster than the boat, you can't control a thing.

Men are sex machines, said Aunt Lydia, and not much more. They only want one thing. You must learn to manipulate them, for your own good.

My red skirt is hitched up to my waist, though no higher. Below it the Commander is fucking. What he is fucking is the lower part of my body.

Once she wasn't supposed to like it. To have her in a position she didn't like, that was power. Even if she liked it she had to pretend she didn't. Then she was supposed to like it. To make her do something she didn't like and then make her like it, that was greater power. The greatest power of all is when she doesn't really like it but she's supposed to like it, so she has to pretend.

Without a word she swivels, as if she's voice activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels, as if she's on top of a music box. I resent this grace of hers. I resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy wind. But there is no wind.

Then I find I'm not ashamed after all. I enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.

You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.

There were pockets within pockets, with a CorpSeCorps hand in each one of them.

Do you think anyone will believe it?" Aunt Elizabeth asked. "They will believe whatever is in the best interests of Ardua Hall," I said firmly. "Which is the same as their own best interests.

The Aunts had their methods, and their informants: no walls were solid for them, no doors locked.

They were concentrating first on the others. They got them more or less under control before they started in on everybody else.

Temptation comes next. At the Center, temptation was anything much more than eating and sleeping. Knowing was a temptation. What you don't know won't tempt you, Aunt Lydia used to say. Maybe

You're to love as a cock-teaser is to fucking.

the urges of men were terrible things and those urges needed to be curbed. The man eyes that were always roaming here and there like the eyes of tigers, those searchlight eyes, needed to be shielded from the alluring and indeed blinding power of us—

Maybe all women should be robots, he thinks with a tinge of acid: the flesh-and-blood ones are out of control.

That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.

I wanted happy endings in those days, and happy endings are best achieved by keeping the right doors locked and going to sleep during the rampages.

men had a thing about hair, it made them spin out of control, they said. And my hair was particularly inflammatory because it was greenish.

Moira had power now, she'd been set loose, she'd set herself loose. She was now a loose woman. I think we found this frightening.