Quotes About Influence

No one shall be forgotten who was great in this world; but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of what he loved.

Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion" – Soren Kierkegaard

I still accept an imperative of knowledge, through which men may be influenced, but then it must come alive in me, and this is what I now recognize as the most important of all. This is what my soul thirsts for as the African deserts thirst for water. This is what I need to live, a completely human life and not merely one of knowledge

None has more contempt for what it is to be a man than they who make it their profession to lead the crowd.

to him who has the ring, the spirit of the ring is obedient, whether he be Noureddin or Aladdin, and he who has the world's treasure, has it, however he got it.

Good to have powerful friends. Even better to be a powerful friend, neh?

In the nature of things a priesthood is always demoralizing.

Testosterone rots the brain . . .

Leading means running fast enough to keep ahead of your people

His grandmother had said to him once, smiling slightly, that if you compelled people to behave as if they believed something eventually all but the strongest-willed really did start to believe it, because it was easier on their pride than admitting every moment in the privacy of their soul that they were pretending.

That's what the British do, you know. They accommodate, and then they assimilate. It's very effective. It's their way of disarming the opposition, and it works.

Who what am I? My answer: I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each 'I', every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow the world.

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

You can get anywhere in Pakistan if you know people, even into jail.

You'll say things all wrong but they'll at once become American ways of saying things. You won't know shit but it'll right away become an American type of ignorance. Not belonging, that's an old American tradition, see?, that's the American way.

Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come

You can lay your strategies as carefully as you like, but women will undo them at a stroke.

Methwold's hair, parted in the middle has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved.

children are the vessels into which adults pour their poison, and it was the poison of grown-ups which did for us.

Már régen tökélyre vitte azt a képességet, hogy csak azt lássa, akit látni akar, ami létfontosságú készség, ha az ember a világnak nem áldozata, hanem ura akar lenni.

The great are eternally at the mercy of tiny men. And also, tiny madwomen.