Quotes About Influence

In a 1948 essay, Toynbee blamed all the false and brutal political movements of the modern world on this baneful Jewish influence, including both Communism and Nazism.

The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally

Under his leadership, the Cistercians had grown from a handful of monasteries to more than 350 houses by 1140. Although he was ten years younger than Abelard, Bernard was already the single most influential churchman of the age.

Men are guided instead by custom, and the personal authority

History, people like to say, is written by the winners. The truth is, some of the most profound works on the past were written by those who considered themselves history's losers.

We have been trained to think of Machiavelli as the apologist for power politics. In fact, his passion for the ideal of liberty was so strong

Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

while Judaism and the Bible gave Christianity its weight and matter, its flesh and blood, Plato and Neoplatonism became its conceptual spine.

Far more than Thomas Aquinas or even Bacon, Ockham is the true forerunner of the modern era.

By 1400, the authority of Aristotle closed virtually every argument. Once a student learned his view on a subject, whether it was a fine point in logic or the number of planets or the functions of body organs, there was no point in going any further. Someone wanting to know how many udders a cow had would be pointed to the relevant passage in Aristotle instead of being sent out to a field to count for himself.

that famous motto that sits above Christopher Wren's tomb at Westminster Abbey... "If you seek his monument, look around you" - meaning London, 17th Century London. I think it's a motto that very much applies to the Scottish contribution to the modern World: that if you seek their monument, the Scots' monument, look around you.

Having seen how the democratic sausage was made, Plato was in no mood to sit at the feast.

The man who discovered the power behind that authority was not Gutenberg or Caxton or even Luther. It was Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Society acts as a mirror to our inner self, by reflecting back to us the reactions of others, and becomes our guide to what is good and evil in the world.

Indian, Chinese, and other Third World intellectuals would encounter a century or two later: how to deal with a dominant culture that one admired but that threatened to overwhelm one's own heritage, and oneself with it.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, might imply. Contemporaries viewed him with awe as the last Roman. We can think of him as the first medieval man, and the man who reintroduced Aristotle to the West. Boethius was born fifty years after Augustine's death

Like the Sun King, all of them turned their nation's printing presses and church pulpits into royalist propaganda machines. What was then "the mainstream media" routinely pointed to the monarch as an essential link in the Great Chain of Being, the center of a divinely preordained and fixed order. A king was more than just a political leader. Heaven had placed him on the throne not only to be obeyed, but to be loved and revered.

Aristotle, we must remember, was a doctor's son.

Thanks to Plato, Socrates's notion of the individual rational soul would become an integral part of Western thinking for the next two thousand years.

They relativized man, in the sense that they made who we are dependent to some degree on our experience in a particular time and place, rather than solely on some inborn quality or sense.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Kleur heb je nooit zelf, kleur krijg je door anderen.

Conversely, the red plant itself burns a brighter red when set off by the green than when it grows among its peers. In the bed I always reserved for poinsettia seedlings, there was little to distinguish one plant from its neighbours. My poinsettia did not turn scarlet until I planted it in new surroundings. Colour is not something one has, colour is bestowed on one by others.

Courage is never to let your actions be influenced by your fears.