You like to claim that you’re in charge of the world, but it’s as if the world hasn’t noticed and it does whatever it pleases in spite of you. You claim the sky is blue, but almost on a daily basis it betrays you.

You can’t manipulate people who know how to think for themselves.

Education can so easily unseat one’s confidence about the truth of the world, Mal noted privately.

When you accidentally assert power over someone or something, one of two things will happen: 1) you will be respected; or 2) you will be hated

No one has the patent on you.

When people are vulnerable to control, they feel that they are selfish for deciding what to do with their own property. In reality, deciding for ourselves is the only way we can ever have true love, for then we are giving freely.