I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.

What you don’t know has power over you; knowing it brings it under your control, and makes it subject to your choice. Ignorance makes real choice impossible.

If you know about yourself, presumably you know about at least one other person.

When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually they lose touch with reality… and fall.

The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

Funny how we take it for granted that we know all there is to know about another person, just because we see them frequently or because of some strong emotional tie.

Your hands already know too much.

You gain power by pretending to be weak.

You have too much social influence upon you. You are not going by your own nature. People do so many nonsensical life-negative things because they don’t want to be left out of the scene around them.

Another weakness found in altogether too many people, is the habit of measuring everything, and everyone, by their own impressions and beliefs.

"Whereas the town knows all about you already and wants to know more and wants to beat you with what it knows till how can you have any of yourself left at all?" ~pg 11

This means fearful, jealous and power-hungry individuals will constantly feed bad seeds into your mind that will limit your potential in life.

War makes monsters of men, you once said to me Todd. Well, so does too much knowledge. Too much knowledge of your fellow man, too much knowledge of his weakness, his pathetic greed and vanity, and how laughably easy it is to control him.