93 Quotes About Control

In our fast-paced world, the concept of control—whether it's over our emotions, our environment, or our future—resonates deeply with many of us. It's a theme explored by philosophers, leaders, and thinkers throughout history, offering insights that can be both empowering and enlightening. If you're on a journey to better understand or master the art of control, you’re in the right place. This collection of 93 quotes about control is meticulously curated to inspire, challenge, and provoke thought. Dive in and discover wisdom that might just change the way you see the world and your place within it.

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

2. “Do you know we are being led toSlaughters by placid admirals& that fat slow generals are gettingObscene on young bloodDo you know we are ruled by t.v.” - Jim Morrison

3. “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

4. “If you can't control your peanut butter, you can't expect to control your life.” - Bill Watterson

5. “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

6. “Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.” - William O. Douglas

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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

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

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

13. “The best way to navigate through life is to give up all of our controls.” - Gerald G. Jampolsky

14. “She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.” - Ian McEwan

15. “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

16. “Along with the mystical wonderment and sense of ecological responsibility that comes with the recognition of connectedness, more disturbing images come to mind. When applied to economics, connectedness seems to take the form of chain stores, multinational corporations, and international trade treaties which wipe out local enterprise and indigenous culture. When I think of it in the realm of religion, I envision smug missionaries who have done such a good job of convincing native people everywhere that their World-Maker is the same as God, and by this shoddy sleight of hand have been steadily impoverishing the world of the great fecundity and complex localism of belief systems that capture truths outside the Western canon. And I wonder—if everything's connected, does that mean that everything can be manipulated and controlled centrally by those who know how to pull strings at strategic places?” - Malcolm Margolin

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

18. “I choose to write because it's perfect for me. It's an escape, a place I can go to hide. It's a friend, when I feel out casted from everyone else. It's a journal, when the only story I can tell is my own. It's a book, when I need to be somewhere else. It's control, when I feel so out of control. It's healing, when everything seems pretty messed up.And it's fun, when life is just flat-out boring.” - Alysha Speer

19. “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

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

21. “The 'will to power and independence' has become so ubiquitous that it is now considered normal.” - Wm. Paul Young

22. “Whomsoever controls the volume of money in any country is absolute master of all industry and commerce and when you realize that the entire system is very easily controlled, one way or another, by a few powerful men at the top, you will not have to be told how periods of inflation and depression originate.” - James Garfield

23. “Dominance. Control. These things the unjust seek most of all. And so it is the duty of the just to defy dominance and to challenge control.” - Robert Fanney

24. “In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go. The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle.” - Garth Stein

25. “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

26. “It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have some semblance of control. But control was something I'd lost a long time ago.” - Nic Sheff

27. “Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. ” - james frey

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

29. “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]

30. “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

31. “You can change only what people know, not what they do.” - Scott Adams

32. “That requires as much power as a small radio transmitter--and rather similar skills to operate. For it's the application of the power, not its amount, that matters. How long do you think Hitler's career as a dictator of Germany would have lasted, if wherever he went a voice was talking quietly in his ear? Or if a steady musical note, loud enough to drown all other sounds and to prevent sleep, filled his brain night and day? Nothing brutal, you appreciate. Yet, in the final analysis, just as irresistible as a tritium bomb.” - Arthur C. Clarke

33. “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

34. “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

35. “As I like to put it, we have hit pay dirt. The effort to cure the resource curse is a good example of what private foundations working with NGOs can accomplish.” - George Soros

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

37. “Probably the wisest words that were ever uttered to me. Came from a therapist. I was sitting in her office, crying my eyes out. . . and she said, "So let me get this straight. You base your personal happiness on things entirely out of your control.” - Laura Munson

38. “If you're in bad mood, take a deep breath.If you're in good mood, give thanks to God.” - Toba Beta

39. “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

40. “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

41. “To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.” - George Bernard Shaw

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

43. “Risk is the factor of a stratagem measured by what man is powerless to control.” - Mike Norton

44. “You learned to run from what you feel, and that's why you have nightmares. To deny is to invite madness. To accept is to control.” - Megan Chance

45. “She felt like a baton getting passed along in a relay race, completely devoid of any control over her destiny.” - Gretchen McNeil

46. “I don't like taking from anyone. I'd rather be a giver, though not for any worthy reason. It's about control, obviously. If I give, I control; if I take, I am controlled. If someone offers me something for free I am at once suspicious.” - Margaret Forster

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

48. “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

49. “Never let haters 'still' your flow. They can only do so with your permission.” - T.F. Hodge

50. “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

51. “It may be a man's world, but men are easily controlled by women.” - Ashly Lorenzana

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

53. “Some of us learn control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.” - B.F. Skinner

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

55. “I am one in a row of specimens. It's when I try to flutter out of line that he hates me. I'm meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive. but it's the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead.” - John Fowles

56. “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

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. “man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer” - Otto von Bismarck

59. “He who controls the remote, controls the world” - Julie Garwood

60. “So much of control is not authoritative action but mindful waiting.” - Cameron Conaway

61. “The COUNTRY is controlled by LAWS>LAWS are controlled by POLITICIANS>POLITICIANS are controlled by VOTERS>VOTERS are controlled by PUBLIC OPINION>PUBLIC OPINION is controlled by the MEDIA (News, Hollywood, Internet...) & EDUCATIONso. whoever controls MEDIA & EDUCATION, controls the COUNTRY.” - William J Federer

62. “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

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. “I would be bored to death if I didn't control a country--Gin” - Shinjo Mayu

65. “Challenge who you can be, don't let fate control your future.” - Steven Redhead

66. “You are the creator of your own perceived reality. Don't be a creation of circumstances. Always take full control of your destiny.” - Steven Redhead

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

68. “I realize the simple truth is that power isn’t control at all- power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others so that they may have the strength to stand on their own.” - Beth Revis

69. “Love. It seemed impossible that she could love him, but she was so deep in him there was really nowhere to go but further in. So this is what love was. Uncontrollable. Consuming. But so irresistible you wanted to be consumed.” - Dianna Hardy

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

71. “It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.” - Epictetus

72. “I have to face the fear. I have to take control of the situation and find a way to make it less frightening.” - Veronica Roth

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

74. “My sister said Mary Elizabeth is suffering from low self-esteem, but I told her that she said the same thing about Sam back in November when she started dating Craig, and Sam is completely different. Everything can't be low self-esteem, can it? My sister tried to clarify things. She said that by introducing me to all these great things, Mary Elizabeth gained a "superior position" that she wouldn't need if she was confident about herself. She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don't, nothing will work out the way they want.” - Stephen Chbosky

75. “The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control.” - John Lanchester

76. “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

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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “You always use that word "remember",' said Milena. 'You say, "remember, team". You never tell us to think.” - Geoff Ryman

81. “—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

82. “The world is already yours - why try to conquer it?” - Rasheed Ogunlaru

83. “...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

84. “The more God asks us to participate in His mysteries, the more disoriented we become, because He asks us constantly to follow our dreams and our hearts. And that's difficult to do when we're used to living in a different way.Finally we discover, to our surprise, that God wants us to be happy, because He is the Father.” - Paulo Coelho

85. “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

86. “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

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

88. “Sydney, don't leave Adrian because of me.""It's more complicated than that," I said automatically."It's really not," she said. "From everything I've seen and heard, you're just afraid. You've always controlled every detail of your life. When you couldn't-like with the Alchemists-you found a way to seize back that control.""There is nothing wrong with wanting control," I snapped."Except that we can't always have it, and sometimes that is a good thing. A great thing, even," she added. "And that's how it is with Adrian. No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to be able to control your feelings for him. You can't help loving him, and so you're running away. I'm just an excuse.” - Richelle Mead

89. “The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.” - Derrick Jensen

90. “I don’t think I like the idea that you just control me, but you get to do anything you like.”“Ah, but that’s because you don’t understand the power exchange. Note that I used the word exchange. Listen, there are as many different ways to practice BDSM as there are people who practice it. I like to play. I like to know that my lover will turn to me when she needs something. I’ll want to protect you. And I like to give you what you need. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel necessary.” - Lexi Blake

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

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

93. “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