Cannot Be Controlled Quotes

“If you can finally go to the bathroom wherever you find one, if you can finally order a cup of coffee and drink it wherever coffee is available, but you cannot follow your heart-you cannot respect the response of your own honest body in the world-then how much of what kind of freedom does any one of us possess?
Or, conversely, if your heart and your honest body can be controlled by the state, or controlled by community taboo, are you not then, and in that case, no more than a slave ruled by outside force?”

— June Jordan

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held. Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”

— Erin Morgenstern

“Love is not a word or an idea or even a place to go to or a thing to strive for. It is not something to grasp and smother and mold and change. It cannot be orchestrated, played, controlled or manipulated. You can not cup it tenderly in your open hand or wish it into being through fervent prayer.”

— Vanessa G. Foster

“Notice that "love thy neighbor" - a wildly popular piece of wisdom found in the Bible - is a command. Jesus is commanding us to love. Now, Jesus understood that emotions and feelings cannot be commanded; they cannot be controlled. He must be saying that love isn't the way you feel about someone, it's the way your treat someone. Love isn't something that happens to you, it's something that you make happen. It's a choice.”

— Cole Ryan

“People cannot be controlled. Only our reactions can.”

— Mary Mihalic

“I've learned much from the land of many gods and many ways to worship. From Buddhism the power to begin to manage my mind, from Jainism the desire to make peace in all aspects of life, while Islam has taught me to desire goodness and to let go of that which cannot be controlled. I thank Judaism for teaching me the power of transcendence in rituals and the Sufis for affirming my ability to find answers within and reconnecting me with the power of music. Here's to the Parsis for teaching me that nature must be touched lightly, and the Sikhs for the importance of spiritual strength ... And most of all, I thank Hinduism for showing me that there are millions of paths to the divine.”

— Sarah Macdonald

“A robust regional food system that benefits eaters and farmers cannot be achieved in a marketplace that is controlled, top to bottom, by a few firms and that rewards only scale, not innovation, quality, or sustainability.”

— Wenonah Hauter

“Now, science cannot completely exclude the possibility of supernatural explanation. It is possible - though very unlikely - that our whole world is controlled by elves.”

— Jerry A. Coyne

“Maybe belief is the biggest lie. In ages past, the earliest philosophers tried to explain the stars in the sky and the world around them. One of them conceived of the notion that the universe was mounted on giant crystal spheres controlled by a giant machine, which explained the movements of the heavens. He was laughed at and told that such a machine would be so huge and noisy that everyone would hear it. He simply replied that we are born with that noise all around us, and that we are so used to hearing it that we cannot hear it at all.”

— Dan Abnett

“Our lack of discipline destroys our freedom. Because we try and don't train wisely, we end up being emotionally driven. We are slaves to the spectacular and the spontaneous. Most men would rather be entertained than be a part of transforming the world, and that erodes manliness and undercuts our confidence. If we can't control ourselves, then we will be controlled by everything else. The angry, domineering masculinity that is so dangerous arises in part because impotent men lack self-control. They lash out because they are frustrated that they cannot control others around them. But they do not control themselves, either, and self-control is where true freedom begins.”

— Darrin Patrick

“Writing becomes a form of protest against the incontestable ravages of time. The poet takes revenge on mortality, defeating cruelty and saving what she can by thinking the unthinkable and presiding over her own creation. The joy of writing stands against the bitter knowledge of just how much of the world cannot be controlled outside the work of art. This is the art of poetry trying to kill time. Probably”

— Edward Hirsch

“The Nightlord cannot be controlled, child. He can only be unleashed. And you asked him not to kill.”

— N.K. Jemisin

“There is no governor anywhere; you are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. We are all absolutely free. If everybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Love is such a wild and reckless creature. It cannot be planned or threaded. It cannot be controlled. Love can coexist with Fate, or it can undo it. Love is the only thing more powerful than Fate.”

— Jennifer L. Armentrout

“The alternative Kennan described as the "particularized" approach. It was "skeptical of any scheme for compressing international affairs into legalist concepts. It holds that the content is more important than the form, and will force its way through any formal structure which is placed upon it. It considers that the thirst for power is still dominant among so many peoples that it cannot be assuaged or controlled by anything but counter-force." Particularism would not reject the idea of joining with other governments to preserve world order, but to be effective such alliances would have to be based "upon real community of interest and outlook, which is to be found only among limited groups of governments, and not upon the abstract formalism of universal international law or international organization.”

— John Lewis Gaddis

“When a newly acquired State has been accustomed, as I have said, to live under its own laws and in freedom, there are three methods whereby it may be held. The first is to destroy it; the second, to go and reside there in person; the third, to suffer it to live on under its own laws, subjecting it to a tribute, and entrusting its government to a few of the inhabitants who will keep the rest your friends. Such a Government, since it is the creature of the new Prince, will see that it cannot stand without his protection and support, and must therefore do all it can to maintain him; and a city accustomed to live in freedom, if it is to be preserved at all, is more easily controlled through its own citizens than in any other way.”

— Niccolò Machiavelli

“These trifles are collected and republished chiefly with a view to their redemption from the many improvements to which they have been subjected while going at random the "rounds of the press." I am naturally anxious that what I have written should circulate as I wrote it, if it circulate at all. In defence of my own taste, nevertheless, it is incumbent upon me to say that I think nothing in this volume of much value to the public, or very creditable to myself. Events not to be controlled have prevented me from making, at any time, any serious effort in what, under happier circumstances, would have been the field of my choice. With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not-they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind. 1845. E. A. P.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“Reason is the tool men use to determine if their statements about reality are valid: there is no other. Those who do not or cannot reason are little better than slaves because their lives are controlled by the ideas of other men, ideas they have not examined.”

— John C. Wright

“If we construct an economy where quantities are controlled, based on the belief there is never enough for all, then we must compete to determine the winners. We begin this with grades in the first grade. There is the presumption that competition is essential and so there must be a normal distribution of grades. All students cannot receive high marks. If I get an A, someone in the class must perform poorly. It is an early lesson in how the marketplace ideology works. In a community organized around abundance, competition will occur, but it is not built into the system as a core design element. In a neighborly culture, the abundance of resources becomes the design element”

— Walter Brueggemann

“Our thoughts are mainly controlled by our subconscious, which is largely formed before the age of 6, and you cannot change the subconscious mind by just thinking about it. That's why the power of positive thinking will not work for most people. The subconscious mind is like a tape player. Until you change the tape, it will not change.”

— Bruce Lipton

“The right of liberty is God-given and immortal. It cannot be regulated. Or controlled. It cannot be banned. And it must not be restricted.”

— Marsha Blackburn

“There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”

— Jeannette Rankin

“Precisely when hominins learned to manipulate fire is unclear. But recent research suggests that fire, in the form of cooking, helps account for the leap into the genus Homo, who became physiologically dependent on cooked food. By boosting calories, and by detoxifying and softening food, controlled fire allowed us to exchange big guts for big brains. Experiments confirm that we cannot thrive or reproduce on raw foods alone: they simply cannot deliver the calories and they require more chewing, digestive juices, and intestinal machinery. With cooking that digestive process begins earlier. If the observations hold, they say that humans and fire have not simply co-existed but co-evolved. We are not only the keystone species for fire: fire is a keystone process for our existence.”

— Anonymous.

“There's a lot of things that go on when you're on tour that cannot be controlled. I'm not even talking about myself, but of course there's sexual activity and drugs, fighting and language; it is certainly not a place to raise a family.”

— Peter Steele

“I had become wiser, I tried to find out what irony really is, and discovered that some ancient writer on poetry had spoken of "Ironia, which we call the drye mock." And I cannot think of a better term for it: The drye mock. Not sarcasm, which is like vinegar, or cynicism, which is so often the voice of disappointed idealism, but a delicate casting of cool and illuminating light on life, and thus an enlargement. The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.”

— Robertson Davies

“Thus on Predator Day we meditate on the Alpha Predator aspects of God. The suddenness and ferocity with which an apprehension of the Divine may appear to us; our smallness and fearfulness-may I say, our Mouselikeness-in the face of such Power; our feelings of individual annihilation in the brightness of that splendid Light. God walks in the tender dawn Gardens of the mind, but He also prowls in its night Forests. He is not a tame Being, my Friends: he is a wild Being, and cannot be summoned and controlled like a Dog.-Adam One”

— Margaret Atwood

“You cannot ask a person who is created to break down fences to be the same who builds them.
The one who breaks fences believes in freedom, no boundaries and universal browsing. Those who build them believe in setting rules for others and make sure other are controlled by his/her concepts ...”

— Sameh Elsayed

“News events cannot be controlled, nor can newscasts be mapped out like entertainment shows.”

— Jessica Savitch

“We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free. (pg. 323, The Pleasures of Eating)”

— Wendell Berry

“For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.”

— Susan Sontag

“Taste cannot be controlled by law.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Everything under heaven is a sacred vessel and cannot be controlled. Trying to control leads to ruin. Trying to grasp, we lose. Allow your life to unfold naturally. Know that it too is a vessel of perfection. Just as you breathe in and breathe out, there is a time for being ahead and a time for being behind; a time for being in motion and a time for being at rest; a time for being vigorous and a time for being exhausted; a time for being safe and a time for being in danger.”

— Lao Tzu

“An economy genuinely local and neighborly offers to localities a measure of security that they cannot derive from a national or a global economy controlled by people who, by principle, have no local commitment.”

— Wendell Berry

“Employees who are controlled cannot respond caringly, you need superior knowledge and real leadership, not management. Because of this we specifically developed a selection process for leaders; we don't hire managers.”

— Horst Schulze

“You determine your assumptions in this way: Form a mental image, a picture of the state desired, of the person you want to be. Concentrate your attention upon the feeling that you are already that person. First, visualize the picture in your consciousness. Then feel yourself to be in that state as though it actually formed your surrounding world. By your imagination that which was a mere mental image is changed into a seemingly solid reality. The great secret is a controlled imagination and a well-sustained attention firmly and repeatedly focused on the object to be accomplished. It cannot be emphasized too much that, by creating an ideal within your mental sphere, by assuming that you are already that ideal, you identify yourself with it and”

— Neville Goddard

“You cannot limit the power of your modesty to just what you wear. It is also controlled or forfeited by where you are willing to go with guys, why you go there, and how you act.”

— Dannah Gresh

“If you try to impose a rigid discipline while teaching a child or a chimp you are working against the boundless curiosity and need for relaxed play that make learning possible in the first place ... learning cannot be controlled; it is out of control by design. Learning emerges spontaneously, it proceeds in an individualistic and unpredictable way, and it achieves its goal in its own good time. Once triggered, learning will not stop
unless it is hijacked by conditioning.”

— Roger Fouts

“Love is the only human emotion that cannot be controlled.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“I think what the American people are saying is enough is enough. This country, this great country, belongs to all of us. It cannot continue to be controlled by a handful of billionaires who apparently want it all.”

— Bernie Sanders

“Fear is a normal human emotion. It is not in itself a killer. We can learn to be aware when fear grips us, and can train to operate through and in spite of our fear. If, on the other hand, we don't understand that fear is normal and has to be controlled and overcome, it will paralyze us and stop us in our tracks. We will no longer think clearly or analyze rationally. We prepare for it and control it; we never let it control us. It if does, we cannot lead.”

— Colin Powell

“It surprises people that there's actually a very large number of slaves in the world today-our best estimate is 27 million. And that is defining a slave in a very narrow way; we're not talking about sweatshop workers or people who are just poor, we're talking about people who are controlled by violence, who cannot walk away, who are being held against their will, who are being paid nothing.”

— Kevin Bales

“I have had so many evidences of [God's] direction, so many instances when I have been controlled by some other power than my own will, that I cannot doubt that this power comes from above.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“What comes forth from you as an artist cannot be controlled. But you have responsibilities as a global citizen. Your history dictates your duty. And by writing about black people, you are not limiting yourself. The experiences of African-Americans are as wide open as God's closet.”

— August Wilson

“Taste cannot be controlled by law. We must resist at all costs any attempt to regulate our individual freedoms and to legislate our personal moralities.”

— Thomas Jefferson

“Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.”

— Friedrich August Von Hayek

“We only have to look around us to see how complexity ... and psychic "temperature" are still rising: and rising no longer on the scale of the individual but now on that of the planet. This indication is so familiar to us that we cannot but recognize the objective, experiential, reality of a directionally controlled transformation of the Noosphere "as a whole."”

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

“As I have mentioned before, we cannot make the same sort of money out of permanent ownership of controlled businesses that can be made from buying and reselling such businesses, or from skilled investment in marketable securities. Nevertheless, they offer a pleasant long term form of activity (when conducted in conjunction with high grade, able people) at satisfactory rates of return.”

— Warren Buffett

“A person who is without fear cannot be controlled.”

— Cheri Huber

“It is no surprise that the Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee has once again caved in to the wishes of the White House and refused even to open an investigation. We cannot effectively legislate on the NSA spying issue if we do not know the facts, and we will not know them if the Republican-controlled intelligence committee persists in refusing to do its job.”

— Harry Reid

“If the six-nation forums dealing with Iran and North Korea suffer comparable failures, the consequence will be a world of unchecked proliferation, not controlled by either governing principles or functioning institutions. A modern, strong, peaceful Iran could become a pillar of stability and progress in the region. This cannot happen unless Iran's leaders decide whether they are representing a cause or a nation - whether their basic motivation is crusading or international cooperation. The goal of the diplomacy of the Six should be to oblige Iran to confront this choice.”

— Henry A. Kissinger