Quotes About Influence

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.

The writer proposes, the readers dispose.

Words can be like X-rays, if you use them properly—they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced. That's one of the things I try to teach my students—how to write piercingly.

I would rather,' he said, 'give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' (And here let me pause to make Mr. Douglas a sporting offer. I will provide a healthy boy, a phial of prussic acid, and a copy of The Well of Loneliness, and if he keeps his word and gives the boy the prussic acid I undertake to pay all expenses of his defense at the ensuing murder trial and to erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged.)

In conjunction with the freedom to daydream under the influence of dope and movies and the radio, it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons- that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to believe in God.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better than one should suffer than that many should be corrupted.

Everybody wants power. Power in some form or other. [...] Some people want power to persecute other human beings; you expend your lust for power in persecuting words, twisting them, molding them, torturing them to obey you.

Mass communication, in a word, is neither good nor bad; it is simply a force and, like any other force, it can be used either well or ill. Used in one way, the press, the radio and the cinema are indispensable to the survival of democracy. Used in another way, they are among the most powerful weapons in the dictator's armory.

His intellectual eminence carries with it corresponding moral responsibilities. The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

When public executions were abolished, it was not because the majority desired their abolition; it was because a small minority of exceptionally sensitive reformers possessed sufficient influence to have them banned.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

VÄ›cí vlády je zasedat, nikoli mlátit. Vládne se hlavou a zadkem, nikoli pÄ›stí.

He wanted to make the children understand that all gods are homemade, and that it's we who pull their strings and so give them the power to pull ours.

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

It is by manipulating "hidden forces" that the advertising experts induce us to buy their wares—a toothpaste, a brand of cigarettes, a political candidate. And it is by appealing to the same hidden forces—and to others too dangerous for Madison Avenue to meddle with—that Hitler induced the German masses to buy themselves a Fuehrer, an insane philosophy and the Second World War.

All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

Success and cynicism are not only achieved; they are also inherited.

Oh, these rags and tags of other people's making! Would he ever be able to call his brain his own? Was there, indeed, anything in it that was truly his own, or was it simply an education?

Is it true that human beings are nothing but the products of their social environment? And if it is not true, what justification can there be for maintaining that the individual is less important than the group of which he is a member?

The Machiavelli of the 20th century will be an advertising man, his Prince , a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time.

Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.

Cuanto mayores son los talentos de un hombre más grande es su poder de corromper a los demás.