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Quotations about control | |
People are just as wonderful as sunsets if I can let them be. . . When I look at a sunset, I don't find myself saying, "Soften the orange a bit on the right hand corner"... I don't try to control a sunset. I watch with awe as it unfolds. If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planed for you? Not much. You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within. Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few. Your mental attitude is something you can control outright and you must use self discipline until you create a positive mental attitude -- your mental attitude attracts to you everything that makes you what you are. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. . . . The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened" -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five -- well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. |
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