Illusion of Control Quotes

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

The masses have never thirsted after truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.

We all start out so damn sure, thinking we've got the world on a string. If we ever stopped to think about the infinite number of ways we could be undone, we'd never leave our bedrooms.

Illusion begets and sustains the world; we do not destroy one without destroying the other. Which is what I do every day. An apparently ineffectual operation, since I must begin all over again the next day.

The gatekeepers don't control the gates, and the powers that be aren't as powerful.

Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.

It’s all about control. Control is illusory. No matter what university you go to, no matter what degree you hold, if your goal is to become master of your own destiny, you have more to learn. Parkinson’s is a perfect metaphor for lack of control. Every unwanted movement in my hand or arm, every twitch that I cannot anticipate or arrest, is a reminder that even in the domain of my own being, I am not calling the shots. I tried to exert control by drinking myself to a place of indifference, which just exacerbated the sense of miserable hopelessness.

Owning things is an obsession in our culture. If we own it, we feel we can control it; and if we control it, we feel it will give us more pleasure. The idea is an illusion.

Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.

I wish that we did have a magic wand which we could wave and hey presto! Magic! Unfortunately life is not like that.

Death is not a checkmate…it is more like a carnival trick. You cannot win, no matter how you move your Queen.

One is never deceived; one deceives oneself.

Imagine wasting all that perfectly good anger on paranoid fantasies. Not since Emily Litella got upset about "Soviet jewelry" has there been such a waste of anger. You will notice a certain theme to these Emily Litella Moments. Behind them all is a touching faith that someone, somewhere is actually in charge of what's happening - a proposition I beg leave to doubt.

I am attracted to characters who think they are in control, but their situation is uncontrollable.

We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark. We stand bewildered before the mystery of our own making, and the riddles of life that we will not solve, and then accuse the great Sphinx of devouring us.

Lack of prayer says you've brought into the lie that life is manageable and you've got everything under control

What you think is an illusion created by your glands, your emotions and, in the last analysis, by the content of your stomach. That gray matter you're so proud of is like a mirror in an amusement park which transmits to you nothing but distorted signals from reality forever beyond your grasp.

At some point, a false belief collides with physical reality.

We usually think of ourselves as sitting the driver's seat, with ultimate control over the decisions we made and the direction our life takes; but, alas, this perception has more to do with our desires-with how we want to view ourselves, than with reality.

What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?

Life being full of harsh realities, we seek relief from them in a variety of pleasing delusions.

All political power is primarily an illusion …. Mirrors and blue smoke …

People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception.

All this strategy is, in truth, an attempt to impose individual will upon a recalcitrant world …. Strategy is often simply a charade—erzatz order imposed on a stubbornly disordered world.