Quotes about Control

I knew Knotcher was trying to push my buttons. Unfortunately, he'd pushed the big red one first.

You're going to turn it into a fascist corporate theme park where the few people who can still afford the price of admission no longer have an ounce of freedom.

The weapon had a built-in timer that would prevent it from firing for another twelve hours (a "cooling-off period") (...).

It is the world's first fully functional noninvasive brain-computer interface. It allows an OASIS user to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel their avatar's virtual environment, via signals transmitted directly into their cerebral cortex. The headset's sensor array also monitors and interprets its wearer's brain activity, allowing them to control their OASIS avatar just as they do their physical body—simply by thinking about it.

I noticed that Halliday had added an old eight-track tape player to the cockpit control panel. There was also a rack of eight-track tapes mounted over my right shoulder. I grabbed one and slapped it into the deck. Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap by AC/DC began to blast out of the robot's internal and external speakers, so loud it made my chair vibrate.

We underestimate God and we overestimate evil. We don't see what God is doing and conclude that he is doing nothing. We see everything that evil is doing and think it is in control of everyone.

Impersonal things that dominate our time and imagination offer extravagant promises of control and knowledge. But they also squeeze all sense of mystery and wonder and reverence out of our lives.

Left to ourselves we turn God into an object, something we can deal with, some thing we can use to our benefit, whether that thing is a feeling or an idea or an image.

The kingdom of self is heavily defended territory.

When men and women get their hands on religion, one of the first things they often do is turn it into an instrument for controlling others, either putting or keeping them "in their place." The history of such religious manipulation and coercion is long and tedious. It is little wonder that people who have only known religion on such terms experience release or escape from it as freedom. The problem is that the freedom turns out to be short-lived.

He tells the sun, 'Don't shine,' and it doesn't; he pulls the blinds on the stars.

Money and machines anesthetize neediness. They put us in charge, in control. As long as the money holds out and the machines are in good repair, we don't need to pray.