Quotes About Influence

Ginsberg turned out to be depressingly prescient when, after a heated argument with Norman Podhoretz in 1958, he yelled, 'We'll get you through your children!' For countless American families, that turned out to be only too true.

The Beats inaugurated the long march through the moral territory of American culture. Who knows how many lives were blighted along the way as a result of their proselytizing on behalf of drugs and promiscuous sex?

The very concept of "ethnocentrism," which is used like a sledge-hammer to disparage the West, is a Western invention.

No longer are you Sekhmet the Slayer: you are Hathor the Lady of Love. Yet your power over mankind shall be greater even than it was – for the passion of love shall be stronger than the passion of hate, and all shall know love, and all shall be your victims.

One person could run a small state, if they were strong and angry enough. But the USA was too big for that.

We have to let everyone hear, the result does not belong to us.

Reading was for him a narrowing, not a widening experience He saw himself as a teacher and reformer born to change the world.

I always got a kick out of it when they called it the California Sound because it really came out of Liverpool and Greenwich Village.

People have told me that other artists have been influenced by my music, and it's flattering. It's a wonderful thing.

Money is the most egalitarian force in society. It confers power on whoever holds it.

To let go is not to be in the middle arranging the outcome, but to allow others to affect their own destinies. To let go is not to be protective. It's to permit another to face reality.

All we know about ourselves comes from the way people loved us.

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power.

language is never innocent.

secularism cannot escape religion, since religion is the reason the secular state exists at all.

When you look at our world, the truth is that we're all under the influence of politics.

Even if we don't know it or aren't aware of it, politics and philosophy are really what make our up lives.

It doesn't take a majority to change a society, or a faith. Only a small minority that yells, threatens, kills, that is willing to do anything to prove to themselves that they're right.

I came to be emulated. That's what people didn't get. Followed, as in being an example, as in making your interior world resemble mine.

Though we do not wholly believe it yet, the interior life is a real life, and the intangible dreams of people have a tangible effect on the world. —James Baldwin

There's about six original people in the world. The rest of everybody else are copycats. When it comes to religion and politics, ninety percent of people do what their parents did and think they made up their minds for themselves. They watch the news to see what the latest trends are.

Families are like countries. They have their own language and jokes and secrets and assumptions about the right and wrong ways of doing things, and some of that always shows in the children, the way something of Germany or Australia always shows in a German or an Australian, no matter where they go. Outsiders like it or they don't, they feel at home there or they don't. It's like the taste of cilantro.

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.

But the books she read changed her. Word by word. Idea by idea.