Quotes About Influence

Le suffrage universel ne me fait pas peur, les gens voteront comme on leur dira

In the United States the most able men are rarely placed at the head of affairs

Equality sets men apart and weakens them; but the press places a powerful weapon within every man's reach, which the weakest and loneliest of them all may use. Equality deprives a man of the support of his connections; but the press enables him to summon all his fellow-countrymen and all his fellow-men to his assistance. Printing has accelerated the progress of equality, and it is also one of its best correctives.

La democrazia è il potere di un popolo informato.

In aristocracies the master often exercises, even without being aware of it, an amazing sway over the opinions, the habits, and the manners of those who obey him, and his influence extends even further than his authority.

It would seem as if the rulers of our time sought only to use men in order to make things great; I wish that they would try a little more to make great men;

The nation's most powerful, intelligent, and morally responsible classes have never tried to take hold of the movement in order to guide it. Democracy has therefore been abandoned to its savage instincts.

Laws cannot succeed in rekindling the ardor of an extinguished faith, but men may be interested in the fate of their country by the laws. By this influence the vague impulse of patriotism, which never abandons the human heart, may be directed and revived; and if it be connected with the thoughts, the passions, and the daily habits of life, it may be consolidated into a durable and rational sentiment.

American priests have realized this truth before everyone else and they allow it to guide their conduct. They saw that they had to forgo religious influence if they wished to win political power and they preferred to lose the support of authority rather than share its changing fortunes.

In the United States religion exercises but little influence upon the laws and upon the details of public opinion, but it directs the manners of the community, and by regulating domestic life it regulates the state.

The people never find the time or the means to devote to this work. They have always to come to hasty judgments and to latch on to the most obvious of features. As a result, charlatans of all kinds know full well the secret of pleasing the people whereas more often than not their real friends fail to do so.

Exceptional physical conditions, private interest, religion, in that it puts a brake on the inordinate taste for material wealth—these are, from the first weeks of the American journey, the three elements that profoundly marked Tocqueville's arguments.

When once the Americans have taken up an idea, whether it be well or ill founded, nothing is more difficult than to eradicate it from their minds.

I am well aware of the influence which the nature of a country and its political precedents exercise upon a constitution; and I should regard it as a great misfortune for mankind if liberty were to exist all over the world under the same forms.

They would thus ruin themselves without warming the hearts of the population that surrounds them. It does not ask of them the sacrifice of their money, but of their haughtiness.

Many of our elected officials have virtually handed the keys to our schools over to corporate interests. Presidential commissions on education are commonly chaired by the executives of large companies.

we limit ourselves to normal cases of mutual influence, we find that those people are most capable of being influenced who are most amenable to reason and logic, those whose social feeling has been least distorted. On the contrary, those who thirst for superiority and desire domination are very difficult to influence. Observation teaches us this fact every day.

She walks. She talks. She adapts. She has been conditioned to respond to the highest bidder.

There are fighting generals (vital to an army), political generals (vital to an administration), and public relations generals (vital to a war).

To hold power has always meant to manipulate idiots and circumstances; and those circumstances and those idiots, tossed together, bring about those coincidences to which even the greatest men confess they owe most of their fame

One is always a good master when one isn't the master

It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.

Definitions create conditions.

Diane Beaver, who served as State Judge Advocate on Guantanamo's Joint Task Force in 2002–04, when it adopted harsh methods, told an interviewer that the show 24 had inspired many of the eighteen controversial interrogation techniques used on detainees, including waterboarding, sexual humiliation, and the terrorizing of prisoners with dogs. Jack Bauer, she said, "gave people lots of ideas," adding: "We saw [24] on cable [and] it was hugely popular.