Control Over Society Quotes & Sayings

Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society ... fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. — Robert M. Pirsig

The British maintained direct control of four major areas in Egyptian society. They included: "security of imperial communications of Egypt, the defense of Egypt against foreign aggression or interference, the protection of foreign interests and foreign minorities, and Sudan and its future status."9 In other words, the British kept control over all aspects of the country that was in their interest and not in the best interests of the Egyptian people. A constitution was signed and implemented in 1923, leading to future expansion of the Egyptian political system. — Robert Eugene Danielson

The problem of society today: An absolute lifestyle of entitlement. People gauge everything by "feeling", meaning whatever they feel like doing or whatever they don't feel like doing. Passion is valued over dedication. Instant gratification is prized over true fulfillment. They don't know that more than feeling; intuition is the better key. They don't know that more than passion; fulfillment and dedication are the better keys. True passion will produce dedication and ultimately - fulfillment. If not, then it should not be called passion; it should just be called a lack of self control/ immaturity. — C. JoyBell C.

It rests on the attempt since the 1970s to translate a pathological degeneration of the principle of laissez-faire into economic reality by the systematic retreat of states from any regulation or control of the activities of profit-making enterprise. This attempt to hand over human society to the (allegedly) self-controlling and wealth- or even welfare-maximising market, populated (allegedly) by actors in rational pursuit of their interests, had no precedent in any earlier phase of capitalist development in any developed economy, not even the USA. It was a reductio ad absurdum of what its ideologists read into Adam Smith, as the correspondingly extremist 100% state-planned command economy of the USSR was of what the Bolsheviks read into Marx. — Eric Hobsbawm

Like some homeopathic cure, our very sense of imprisonment can be a step toward liberation. We need not rebel against our temporally determined roles. Merely to recognize them is to limit their power over us. The liberation implied by such awareness is threefold. To understand one's own temporal determinism is to establish, above and beyond what one says and does, an analytic posture toward the present as history; it is to achieve, amid the earnest vanities of contemporary society, an easing humility; it is to mark off, as territory precious and imperiled, the moments and pursuits that are left to our choice. — Robert Grudin

The mechanical mind has a passion for control - of everything except itself. Beyond the control it has won over the forces of nature it would now win control over the forces of society of stating the problem and producing the solution, with social machinery to correspond. — L. P. Jacks

It matters enormously to a successful democratic society like ours that we have three branches of government, each with some independence and some control over the other two. That's set out in the Constitution. — Sandra Day O'Connor

Freedom is not defined by safety. Freedom is defined by the ability of citizens to live without government interference. Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens' lives. Liberty has meaning only if we still believe in it when terrible things happen and a false government security blanket beckons. — Ron Paul

The reason many people in our society are miserable, sick, and highly stressed is because of an unhealthy attachment to things they have no control over. — Steve Maraboli

By definition, the moment one crosses from center to left, one accepts more government control of people's lives. Therefore, the further left society moves, the more there is government control over its citizens' lives. It is astonishing that this obvious fact is not universally acknowledged and that the Left has somehow successfully portrayed itself as preoccupied with personal liberty. — Dennis Prager

I want to have complete control over every media so that when I make my record I put on it what I want to put on it. Not what society wants me to put on it. — Peter Tosh

The fallacy of the socialists37 lies in supposing that because in the present stage of European society property as a source of power is predominant, the same is true of India, or the same was true of Europe in the past. Religion, social status, and property are all sources of power and authority which one man has to control the liberty of another. One is predominant at one stage; the other is predominant at another stage. That is the only difference. If liberty is the ideal, and if liberty means the destruction of the dominion which one man holds over another, then obviously it cannot be insisted upon that economic reform must be the one kind of reform worthy of pursuit. If the source of power and dominion is, at any given time or in any given society, social and religious, then social reform and religious reform must be accepted as the necessary sort of reform. — B.R. Ambedkar

Piketty's crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions. — Thomas Sowell

The recent experience of totalitarianism in Europe was foreshadowed at the French Revolution, when the Committee of Public Safety acted in the same way as the Nazi and Communist parties, setting up 'parallel structures' through which to control the state and to exert a micromanagerial tyranny over every aspect of civil society.
Let us at least be realistic, and recognize that, if totalitarian governments have arisen and spread with such rapidity in modern times, this is because there is something in human nature to which they correspond and on which they draw for their moral energy. — Roger Scruton

Where the Depression years had aroused a deep sense of concern over how American wealth was distributed and American society structured, the successive crises of the 1960s and early 1970s, by highlighting the contradiction between the destructive capability of American technology and the moral opaqueness of those Americans who had ultimate control over its use, raised questions about the very course of "modern" historical development. After Vietnam, there could be no more easy assumptions about the goodness of American power, no more easy equating of being "modern" with being "civilized. — Paul A. Cohen

In our modern society the image and mythic process has been taken over by corporations that directly control advertising and, indirectly, the entertainment industry. Powerful erotic images are used for the sole purpose of selling consumer products; the side effects of this commercialization have a profound impact on the sexual imagination and identity of vast numbers of people. — Robert Lawlor

What's more, sharia finance is another tool of Islamic separatism; instead of assimilating into American society, Muslims are demanding, and receiving, parallel financial institutions that reinforce the idea that they are unique, not subject to the laws and norms to which the rest of us are subject-a privileged class. At the same time, sharia finance initiatives are giving Islamic interests increased control over Western economic life. — Robert Spencer

suffering transforms our attitude toward ourselves. It humbles us and removes unrealistic self-regard and pride. It shows us how fragile we are. As Davies points out, average people in Western society have extremely unrealistic ideas of how much control they have over how their lives go. Suffering removes the blinders. It does not so much make us helpless and out of control as it shows us we have always been vulnerable and dependent on God. Suffering merely helps us wake up to that fact and live in accordance with it. — Timothy J. Keller

Society thinks of violent acts as manifestations of evil or immorality. We're told we have ultimate control over our own behavior, that each and every one of us has the free will to choose not to hurt another human being. But it's not just morality that guides us. Biology does as well. Our frontal lobs helps us integrate thoughts and actions. They help us weight the consequences of those actions. Without such control, we'd give in to every wild impulse. — Tess Gerritsen

What is called 'capitalism'is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy, political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close cooperation with powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international society. — Noam Chomsky

To control the future requires the control of education and of the child. Hence, for Christians to tolerate statist education, or to allow their children to be trained thereby, means to renounce power in society, to renounce their children, and to deny Christ's Lordship over all of life. — Rousas John Rushdoony

And yet, women keep trying. They put off the rent or the utilities to scrape together the $500 for a first-trimester abortion. They drive across whole states to get to a clinic and sleep in their cars because they can't afford a motel. They do not do this because they are careless sluts or because they hate babies or because they fail to see clearly what their alternatives are. They see the alternatives all too clearly. We live, as Ellen Willis wrote, in a society that is "actively hostile to women's ambitions for a better life. Under these conditions the unwillingly pregnant woman faces a terrifying loss of control over her fate." Abortion, wrote Willis, is an act of self-defense.5 — Katha Pollitt

Socialism to me is establishing social control of power in society, and where that differs from liberalism for example which aims at a similar situation in some respects, is we think you can only establish control over power by changing the structure and distribution of power, notably economic power. — Denis Healey

The third group [of society] are those irresponsible and reckless ones having little regard for the consequences of their acts, or whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers. Many of this group are diseased, feeble-minded, and are of the pauper element dependent upon the normal and fit members of society for their support. There is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped. — Margaret Sanger

The last great attempt to free consciousness from the domination of impulses and social controls was psychoanalysis; as Freud pointed out, the two tyrants that fought for control over the mind were the id and the superago, the first a servant of a genes, the second a lackey of society - both representing the "Other". — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

In a consumer society, expectations dare not plateau, because a growing economy depends on rising expectations ... The more we let our level of contentment be determined by outside factors-a new car, fashionable clothes, a prestigious career, social status-the more we relinquish control over our own happiness. — Paul Brand

The 'global warming scare' is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society's activities. — Harrison Schmitt

Popular struggles to bring about a freer and more just society have been resisted by violence and repression, and massive efforts to control opinion and attitudes. Over time, however, they have met with considerable success, even though there is a long way to go, and there is often regression. — Noam Chomsky

[D]ecade after decade, through taxes and regulations, governments at all levels took ever-increasing control over people's lives, wealth, and property. The control grew exponentially, decade after decade. The rationale was that the control was necessary
for society, for the poor, for the nation, even for freedom itself. Americans continued living their life of the lie: they continued believing that the more control government exercised over their lives and property, the freer they became. — Jacob G. Hornberger

Mills surveyed a postwar landscape in which Mass Man had been successfully alienated from the actual levers of power in the society. As institutions grew larger, and war and governance more complex, a subclass of men that Mills dubbed the "Power Elite" exerted more and more control over the nation's pillar institutions. "Insofar — Christopher L. Hayes

Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion known to man, something deeply inscribed in our nervous system and subconscious. Over time, however, something strange began to happen. The actual terrors that we faced began to lessen in intensity as we gained increasing control over our environment. But instead of our fears lessening a well, they began to multiply in number. We started to worry about our status in society- whether people liked us, or how we fit into the group. We became anxious for our livelihoods, the future of our families and children, our personal health, and the aging process. Instead of a simple, intense fear of something powerful and real, we developed a kind of generalized anxiety. — Robert Greene

The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men's fatal striving to control society - a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals. — Friedrich Hayek

To be clear, civilization is not the same as society. Civilization is a specific, hierarchical organization based on 'power over.' Dismantling civilization, taking down that power structure, does not mean the end of all social order. It should ultimately mean more justice, more local control, more democracy, and more human rights, not less. — Derrick Jensen

The background of the Negro culture is voodoo and magic; and the purposes the magic are control and power over God, man, nature and society. Voodoo and magic was the religion and life of America's Negro. — R.J. Rushdoony

Liar! I know that you humans build your life in lies. It starts with your mortal lords and their fabricated gods. They use fictitious stories to impregnate the minds of people, and like herds of sheep they do as their told. With manipulation alone is enough to secure their reign. After all, is it not in your nature to be wanted and purposeful? It is such an easy game to play. I have observed this falsehood accepted by fathers and mothers over and over again. The idiocy becomes one with their children, and they become the infrastructure that not only sedates but corrodes the soul with instructed conformity. In the end, lies are all that you are. — H.S. Crow

By taking a look back at history, we can easily come to understand how the elite gained so much control over society, and what their motives are. The people in power do not care about the power of the people. They care about control, they do not want people to be smart or independent, they want them to be good workers, obedient and unaware. — Joseph P. Kauffman

The myth of self-sufficiency blinds us to the workings of other forces in family life. For families are not now, nor were they ever, the self-sufficient building blocks of society, exclusively responsible, praiseworthy, and blamable for their own destiny. They are deeply influenced by broad social and economic forces over which they have little control. — Kenneth Keniston

There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them. — Norman Finkelstein

Radicalism itself ceases to be radical when absorbed mainly in preserving its control over a society or an economy. — Eric Hoffer

Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number. — Michael Pare

Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race. Its consolations deserve no trust. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. The ethical commands, to which religion seeks to lend its weight, require some other foundations instead, for human society cannot do without them, and it is dangerous to link up obedience to them with religious belief. If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man's evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity. — Sigmund Freud

The women tended the crops and took general charge of village affairs while the men were always hunting or fishing. And since they supplied the moccasins and food for warring expeditions, they had some control over military matters. As Gary B. Nash notes in his fascinating study of early America, Red, White, and Black: "Thus power was shared between the sexes and the European idea of male dominancy and female subordination in all things was conspicuously absent in Iroquois society. — Howard Zinn

If we overregulate, over control, impose too many burdens and too much bureaucracy - or if we do it across the board, without taking into account the differences among businesses and their relative impact on society - that could make people risk-averse and dampen the entrepreneurial spirit. — Samuel J. Palmisano

Money ... is the nerve center of the economic system. If, therefore, the state is able to gain unquestioned control over the unit of all accounts, the state will then be in a position to dominate the entire economic system, and the whole society. — Murray Rothbard

Needless to say, Lot kept his faith to himself. He told no one of his family background, for fear of them discovering his religion. He never told anyone who he really was. He also saw that the society that touted itself as the "Cities of Love" was actually quite inhospitable to strangers and visitors. Traveling merchants who came to sell their wares in the cities were usually beat up and run out of town, because they were considered greedy. In reality, it was because their prices were so cheap. But the local workers maintained a greedy control over the marketplace. The city took so much of the workers' income, they barely had enough to live on. So, they did not want anyone else to have what they could not. — Brian Godawa

Its little wonder anxiety, depression and other mental illness is at such a high point at this time in the world; people have little control over the mental capacities, of their thoughts, perceptions, feelings and emotions. People never get a moments silence from the constant bombardment and when they do they don't know how to manage their thoughts so the endless barrage of noise simply continues giving them no time or space for clarity. — Evan Sutter

It's up to you how you react to things. It's up to me how I handle situations. It's up to us how we deal with each other. Each couple is defined by themselves, not by society or any other outside factor ... unless they let them define them. And once they do, then they no longer have control over their own relationship. — Shelly Crane

Any society that entails the strengthening of the state apparatus by giving it unchecked control over the economy, and re-unites the polity and the economy, is an historical regression. In it there is no more future for the public, or for the freedoms it supported, than there was under feudalism. — Robert Higgs

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas. — Karl Marx

Nonetheless, by the time we arrive at the eighteenth century and the time of the founders, marriage and the family came to look very much as Aristotle had pictured it. In the previous centuries, Lutheran reforms had lodged marriage into the civil structure of society and made it more a concern of civil law,11 but, joined by Calvin, Protestantism retained parental control over the right of children to marry. John Locke, however, saw marriage as contracted political society, and thus his image of the family as a commonwealth made up of combined individuals parallel his image of the formation of the larger political commonwealth as well.12 Furthermore, Locke declares that parents are, "by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish and educate" their children.13 Since government is instituted to enforce the laws of nature, Locke states that government should make laws that enforce "the security of the marriage bed.'14 What — Jean Bethke Elshtain

I harbor ill feelings toward a society, and a clergy, that allows marriage partners to split over the smallest incompatibility, where divorce comes in a multitude of flavors, like Baskin Robbins ice cream, where men and women can blame one another and everything except themselves for matrimony's mess. They look for externals over which they have no control and, fingering them, take no responsibility. — Robert Dykstra

The phenomenon of money presupposes an economic order in which production is based on division of labour and in which private property consists not only in goods of the first order (consumption goods), but also in goods of higher orders (production goods). In such a society, there is no systematic centralized control of production, for this is inconceivable without centralized disposal over the means of production. — Ludwig Von Mises

Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings, once we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force. What's more, woman's consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and the relations between classes.

The importance of dialectical materialism lies in going beyond the inherent limits of biology, rejecting simplistic theories about our being slaves to the nature of our species, and, instead, placing facts in their social and economic context. — Thomas Sankara

Ultimately it is by harnessing the natural economic forces which drive society that the pollution tax offers us an opportunity to exert greater control over our environment. — Greg Hunt