101 Quotes About Control

In a world that often seems chaotic and unpredictable, the desire for control is a common thread that binds us all. Whether it's managing our personal lives, steering our careers, or simply maintaining inner peace, control can feel like a crucial element in the pursuit of happiness. This collection of the top 101 quotes about control offers wisdom from a diverse range of voices—philosophers, leaders, writers, and thinkers—who illuminate the complexities and nuances of what it means to truly be in charge. Dive into these thought-provoking quotes to gain insights, find inspiration, and perhaps reshape your perspective on control and its role in your life.

1. “Foresight of phenomenon and power over them depend on knowledge of their sequences, and not upon any notion we may have formed respecting their origin or inmost nature.” - John Stuart Mill

2. “Control is as much an effect as a cause, and the idea that control is something you exert is a real handicap to progress” - Steve Grand

3. “Whoever controls the media, controls the mind” - Jim Morrison

4. “Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.” - Ralph Ellison

5. “Political tags — such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth — are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.” - Robert A. Heinlein

6. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” - George Orwell

7. “Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.” - Thomas A. Kempis

8. “No one ever said that you would live to see the repercussions of everything you do, or that you have guarantees, or that you are not obliged to wander in the dark, or that everything will be proved to you and neatly verified like something in science. Nothing is: at least nothing that is worthwhile. I didn't bring you up only to move across sure ground. I didn't teach you to think that everything must be within our control or understanding. Did I? For, if I did, I was wrong. I fyou won't take a chance, then the powers you refuse because you cannot explain them, will, as they say, make a monkey out of you.” - Mark Helprin

9. “Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.” - Madeline L'Engle

10. “All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.” - Noam Chomsky

11. “Is is true that dictators never dream because they can change their smallest fantasies into realities if they want to?” - Alfred De Musset

12. “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

13. “There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.” - Aleksandar Hemon

14. “Whats the difference between a king and his horse?I dont mean some kiddy shit like one has 4 legs and the other has 2, or ones a person and ones an animal. If their form, ability, and power is exactly the same, then why is it one becomes the king and controls the battle and the other one becomes the horse and carries the king? There's only one answer...INSTINCT!!!” - Tite Kubo

15. “I'm simply interested in what is going to happen next. I don't think I can control my life or my writing. Every other writer I know feels he is steering himself, and I don't have that feeling. I don't have that sort of control. I'm simply becoming. I'm startled that I became a writer.” - Kurt Vonnegut

16. “Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.” - Epictetus

17. “Control is never achieved when sought after directly; it is the surprising result of letting go.” - James Arthur Ray

18. “You must learn to let go. Release the stress. You were never in control anyway.” - Steve Maraboli

19. “Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.” - Steve Maraboli

20. “The world can be such a fright, but it belongs to us tonight.” - Craig Ferguson

21. “The health care bill is nothing about health care- it's about controlling the people.” - David Lincoln

22. “We sensible often resist intrusive love and its chaos practically, employing measures to prevent the former for fear of the latter. But for all our wit and work, that desperation for control also prevents the pure, transcendental freedom more often delivered by both.” - Tiffany Madison

23. “England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare's much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income. It is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts. Still, it is a family. It has its private language and its common memories, and at the approach of an enemy it closes its ranks. A family with the wrong members in control - that, perhaps is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.” - George Orwell

24. “Withholding information is the essence of tyranny. Control of the flow of information is the tool of the dictatorship.” - Bruce Coville

25. “It (trying to keep the law) grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in its more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainty out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.” - Wm. Paul Young

26. “Any woman who is sure of her own wits, is a match, at any time, for a man who is not sure of his own temper.” - Wilkie Collins

27. “Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless ... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever."[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.]” - Toni Morrison

28. “You and I, we must carry on, Gemma. I cannot afford the luxury of love. I must marry well. And now I must look after you. It is my duty.""If you wish to suffer, you do so of your own free will, not on my behalf. Or Father's or Grandmama's or anyone's. You are a fine physician, Thomas. Why is that not enough?""Because it isn't," he says with a rare candor. "Only this and the hope of nothing more? A quiet respectability with no true greatness or heroism in it, with only my reputation to recommend me. So you see, Gemma, you are not the only one who cannot rule her own life.” - Libba Bray

29. “You’ll tell yourself anything you have to, to pretend that you’re still the one in control.” - Jodi Picoult

30. “There are some things I can't control, & that's just the way it is.” - Susane Colasanti

31. “Sometimes, we feel conscious but unable to move our body. The first thing to do is focus in a prayer, then start to wink frequently.By this way, slowly but sure our body can be moved totally by our persistent willpower.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

32. “Always try to be joyful and proactively benign to the people. By doing so everyday, people have no control at all over my mood.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

33. “What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.” - George Orwell

34. “Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

35. “They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.” - Ray Bradbury

36. “Money is like fire. It is only good when there's just the right amount of it, when it's properly contained and under your control.” - Vera Nazarian

37. “The problem with a plan is that you fill up the blank page of a new day with a 'to-do' list before you get there. And if you're not careful there's no room for anything else.A plan, especially a very focused one, narrows down the possibilies of the future to just a couple of things: that things either go to plan, or they don't.” - John C. Parkin

38. “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

39. “The main obstacle to further progress on the resource curse is China, and to a lesser extent India.” - George Soros

40. “Humility means accepting reality with no attempt to outsmart it.” - David Richo

41. “We've become a nation of wolves, ruled by sheep.Owned by swine, overfed, and put to sleep.While the media elite declare what to think,I'll be wide awake, on the edge, and on the brink.” - Otep Shamaya

42. “The good news is that you may have created my past and screwed up my present, but you have no control over my future. You don't know me at all.” - David Klass

43. “But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.” - Margaret Atwood

44. “It's not that you should never love something so much that it can control you.It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled.It's not a weakness.It's your best strength.” - Patrick Ness

45. “The creative process is a process of surrender, not control.” - Julia Cameron

46. “You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.” - Wallace Stegner

47. “I felt as if I had no control over what I said, as if loathsome, ugly words were waiting inside me like snakes and toads looking for a chance to sneak out before I could stop them.” - Gloria Whelan

48. “Manipulation, fueled with good intent, can be a blessing. But when used wickedly, it is the beginning of a magician's karmic calamity.” - T.F. Hodge

49. “No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have you own way.” - Chuck Palahniuk

50. “God's relationship with man does not work in a way in which man stumbles and then God has to drop what he is doing in order to lift him up; rather, man stumbles so that God can lift him up. Hence it is utterly impossible to truly diminish his glory.” - Criss Jami

51. “There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.” - Orson Scott Card

52. “Taking on too much of other people's drama is just a poor excuse for not taking ownership and control over your own life.” - José N. Harris

53. “To find love is the great human undertaking...and it's always complicated by our compulsions and unconscious patterns, to say nothing of issues of trust and control.” - Michelle Huneven

54. “Imagine a land where people are afraid of dragons. It is a reasonable fear: dragons possess a number of qualities that make being afraid of them a very commendable response. Things like their terrible size, their ability to spout fire, or to crack boulders into splinters with their massive talons. In fact, the only terrifying quality that dragons do not possess is that of existence.Now, the people of this land know about dragons because their leaders have warned them about them. They tell stories about cruel dragons with razor teeth and fiery breath. They recount legends of dragons hunting by night on silent wings. In short, the leaders make sure that the people believe in all the qualities of dragons, including that key quality of existence. And then they control the people — when they need to — with their fear of dragons. The people pay a dragon-slaying tax … everyone stays indoors after dark to avoid being snatched by swooping claws … and nobody ever strays out of bounds for fear of being eaten well and truly up.Perhaps somebody will wonder if dragons aren’t, after all, fictitious because — despite their size — nobody seems to have actually seen one. And so it is necessary from time to time to provide evidence: a burnt tree or two, a splintered rock, the mysterious absence of a villager. The population is controlled by the dragons in its collective mind. It’s contrived superstition, and it is possible because the people do not know enough about the way the world works to know that dragons do not exist.” - David Whiteland

55. “Foolish men always believe that a little knowledge will give them control over the world, but it is no more than a display of their vanity.” - J. P. Vinluca

56. “Women only cut their hair in times of crisis... It's somethin' a woman always has the power to do, even when she loses control over everything else. Cuttin' hair is a cry for help.” - Bella Pollen

57. “There are those whose primary ability is to spin wheels of manipulation. It is their second skin and without these spinning wheels, they simply do not know how to function. They are like toys on wheels of manipulation and control. If you remove one of the wheels, they'll never be able to feel secure, be whole.” - C. JoyBell C.

58. “The truth is that this was something over which I had no control and the question is not why but what. What am I going to do with this? What am I going to make of it?” - Vicki Forman

59. “The finest fury is the most controlled.” - Christopher Hitchens

60. “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control, and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.[Pournelle's law of Bureaucracy]” - Jerry Pournelle

61. “The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” - H.L. Mencken

62. “I think a lot of psychopaths are just geniuses who drove so fast that they lost control.” - Criss Jami

63. “I have heard that, with some persons, temperance – that is, moderation – is almost impossible; and if abstinence be an evil (which some have doubted), no one will deny that excess is a greater. Some parents have entirely prohibited their children from tasting intoxicating liquors; but a parent’s authority cannot last for ever; children are naturally prone to hanker after forbidden things; and a child, in such a case, would be likely to have a strong curiosity to taste, and try the effect of what has been so lauded and enjoyed by others, so strictly forbidden to himself – which curiosity would generally be gratified on the first convenient opportunity; and the restraint once broken, serious consequences might ensue.” - Anne Brontë

64. “And no wonder; for the new technique of "subliminal projection," as it was called, was intimately associated with mass entertainment, and in the life of civilized human beings massed entertainment now plays a part comparable to that played in the Middle Ages be religion.” - Aldous Huxley

65. “Woe is the mind of the common man, so easily controlled by the prospect of an ambition never to be truly attained. This is what tyrants live on and by what commoners are blissfully burdened and subdued.” - Evan Meekins

66. “Don't be a creation of circumstances, create your dreams, take full control of your destiny.” - Steven Redhead

67. “Start living by taking back the control of your life now! Create a life more in tune with your true desires.” - Steven Redhead

68. “Let us liberate ourselves from any form of control. Let us focus at the inner drum, where the rhythm aligns with that of our heart. The measure of responsibility, equals to the need for evolution. Just listen, the inner child, let it whisper in your ear.” - Grigoris Deoudis

69. “At this point in my life, beaming confidence is largely a matter of mind over bladder control” - Josh Stern

70. “Kessa began to cut her meat into tiny pieces. As a whole it was unmanageable, frightening; but divided and arranged, the meat could be controlled. She cut four pieces. She'd count to four between each bite.” - Steven Levenkron

71. “Break the character and independence of your man and you will have an obedient trooper.” - Jan Valtin

72. “I rang the bell and she opened the door, dried her hands, and said heartily: 'Hello, stranger. I was just saying to Cliff only tonight, it's about time you showed up around here.' I wanted to detach him from her, but first I had to sit through about ten minutes of her. She was my sister, but you don't tell women things like I wanted to tell him. I don't know why, but you don't. You tell them the things you have under control; the things that you're frightened of, you tell other men if you tell anyone. ("Nightmare")” - Cornell Woolrich

73. “I used to send my characters into a fire that necessarily consumed them, but I have learned, a little, how to send them through the fire to a new place. The characters who do not change — most notably Nakota in Cipher, Bibi in Skin, and Lena in Kink — are motivated by an essential selfishness or self-centeredness, an unwillingness to relinquish control to the process, a refusal to become.” - Kathe Koja

74. “We have to try to control what we can or else we cannot judge progress.” - Lionel Suggs

75. “The game had to be played the same way every day or the pieces would fall to the floor, the board would collapse, and the illusion that you were shaping your own life, that you were in control, would break.” - Kevin Brockmeier

76. “No, I wanted to say, he didn't cut off her hands because he didn't have to, he had cut them off long before, with years of keeping all authority in his own palms, all the rules and all the power and all the answers emanating from him and no one else. And if you don't understand that, if you've never been in such a family, then you can't know the way the mind shackles itself and amputates its own limbs so adeptly that you never think to miss them, never think that you had anything so obscene as choice.” - Carolina De Robertis

77. “—Necesito sentir que tengo el control.—Ah, ahora me has dado un desafío. — Él dio un paso más cerca. — Para hacerte perder el control.” - Kerrelyn Sparks

78. “Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!” - Daniel Gilbert

79. “You must learn to control your dreams or your dreams will forever control you.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

80. “We all have control over what kind of person we are. Each word that comes out, each action that we take, defines us.” - Ruth Cardello

81. “...I'm not in control and without a firm spot, like Archimedes I can't move the world - let alone your heart..” - John Geddes

82. “...I retreat into my fictional world where everything makes sense - but even there I can't even control what people do...” - John Geddes A Familiar Rain

83. “It all fell away then – the control, the independence . . . everything. She had known it would never be easy to findsolitude . . . to find herself. Not in this city, where appearances were everything; where emptiness filled luxurious landscapes till there was nothing but hollow splendor…She hated the pretense.More than hatred, she was frightened of it.” - Umair Naeem

84. “The real problem is I'm greedy. I want complete, utter, unceasing bliss. But I don't want to fall into it either. If happiness were money I wouldn't want to win the lottery. I want to accomplish it, urn it as John Houseman would say. I want it to be an achievement because I want to be in control of my life. I don't want things to happen to me, I want them to happen because of me. Power I want. I want to feel the way I do when I stretch a new canvas and I want to feel that way all the time. the blank canvas fills me with the power of imminent creation. I'm its god an it always bends to my will and when I'm done I know, inside, that it's markedly better than what almost all of my similarly-engaged others can achieve. That's happiness.” - Sergio De La Pava

85. “Sholem [a painter] was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing. [...] "It's like with improv," Misha said. "True improv is about surprising yourself--but most people won't improvise truthfully. They're afraid. What they do is pull from their bag of tricks. They take what they already know how to do and apply it to the present situation. But that's cheating! And cheating's bad for an artist. It's bad in life--but it's really bad in art." -p.20-1, How Should A Person Be” - Sheila Heti

86. “Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.” - Thornton Wilder

87. “You want to be competent? she thought. You want to learn to be in control of what goes on around you, rather than just being pushed around? Then you’ll have to learn to deal with failure.” - Brandon Sanderson

88. “Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.” - Peter Watts

89. “Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party.” - Bertrand Russell

90. “I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness.' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.” - Fred Rogers

91. “Free yourself from fruitlessly worrying about things you can’t control and put your energy towards the things you can. Seize the day and take effective action on things you can change.” - Steve Maraboli

92. “There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.” - Adrienne Rich

93. “Punishment? You don’t have any right to punish me. And I can curse. I choose not to most of the time, but don’t think it doesn’t go through my head, asshole. I was trying to give you something. I was trying to give you my body.”“That’s where you fucked up, little girl. I don’t want your body. I want your soul. I want your everything. And I definitely want your orgasms. I want them all. I’ll be a greedy bastard, savoring them and hoarding them all for myself. You wanted to give me your body? I can buy that on a street corner, sweetheart. You’re the one who’s being selfish now.”“How is it selfish to offer to have sex? I don’t understand what you want.” “First off, I want you to stop hiding yourself from me. You’re the one making this tawdry by pretending it’s dirty and not worthy of the light of day.”“I didn’t mean it that way.” “We’re going to do this my way. We tried yours and it didn’t work, so I’m taking control. I should have done it in the first place.” - Lexi Blake

94. “Maturity: knowing where you're crazy, trying to warn others of the fact and striving to keep yourself under control.” - Alain De Botton

95. “Wishing for control is like wishing for the rapture.” - Chuck Klosterman

96. “Control is violence; cooperation is friendship.” - Bryant McGill

97. “Control is not humble; control is arrogant.” - Bryant McGill

98. “All violence demands reform, and all violence desperately begs to be healed.” - Bryant McGillns

99. “She waited for him with shallow breaths, head thrown back, eyes half closed, completely exposed in her trust of him, and it unravelled the last thread holding him together.” - Dianna Hardy

100. “And then there was Lydia.Lydia who had hurtled into his life – into their lives – with hair like fire, eyes like amethysts and a fuck-me scent so palpable that he’d betrayed the only woman he’d ever loved.” - Dianna Hardy

101. “His rules were thus: One, resist when beneficial to the cause. Two, dignity before humiliation. Three, don’t show true emotions.” - Courtney Kirchoff