Quotes About Influence

If we don't truly know what something is programmed to do, chances are it is programming us. Once that happens, we may as well be machines ourselves.

Anchoring bias" refers to our tendency to rely on the first information we hear.

If nothing else, living in a digital media environment should help us become more aware of the programming all around us.

Telling someone to change makes it less rather than more likely that they will.

Simply by changing your own behavior, you gain at least some influence over the problem.

A greater sense of do-it-yourself (DIY) politics is exposed by the fact Cascadians are more likely to disagree that "voting is the only way people like me can have a say about how the government runs things" (54 percent disagree versus 37 percent, RoNA).

Douglas W. Hubbard

Propaganda (things to be propagated) is inescapable. It is not *whether* certain values will be propagated, but rather, *which* values will be propagated.

He who walks with the wise will be wise, Scripture saith, and he who walks with the witty will eventually start to pop off himself.

Most of what is shaping you in the course of your reading you will not be able to remember. The most formative years of my life were the first five, and if those years were to be evaluated on the basis of my ability to pass a test on them, the conclusion would be that nothing important happened then, which would be false. The fact that you can't remember things doesn't mean that you haven't been shaped by them.

The apostle James tells us that a man who can control his tongue can control the rest of his body as well. This goes double for the man who is putting what the tongue does into a more permanent setting.

Reformers must remember always that religion shapes culture, and culture trumps politics.

Blaming public Christians for being 'too political' is like blaming Noah's ark for being 'too wet

Control of the future is actually a (vain) attempt to control people, with the future as our instrument.

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

The church is in the world the way a ship is in the ocean, and that is the way it should be. But bad things start happening when the ocean gets into the ship.

Attaching "produced at Berkeley, Harvard, MIT" to a ridiculous argument immediately makes it cogent to many. That's part of life, but let's not pretend that it's rationality.

Imitation is absolutely crucial for childrearing. You do not want your children imitating you unless you are imitating God.

The reformation of the church must occur so that there is a reformation of our subculture, and then our subculture will affect the larger polis. Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen.

Collections do not leave the collector unaffected. The art of collecting results in a certain turn of mind.

How can you persuade a man whose livelihood depends upon him remaining unpersuaded?

Scripture focuses on the political rulers, and this is because it is where the fundamental challenge was mounted.

Education is the process of selling someone on books.

Beware of anyone who claims to be neutral, for they always have an agenda.