Quotes About Influence

Much may be made of a Scotchman if he be caught young.

You can't be in politics unless you can walk in a room and know in a minute who's for you and who's against you.

He left the name at which the world grew pale,To point a moral, or adorn a tale.

Blown about by every wind of criticism.

It is generally agreed, that few men are made better by affluence or exaltation.

The father of English criticism.

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drive into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire. I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl. Let him come out as I do, and bark.

The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.

Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.

Religion for them, as Régis Debray put it, is not "the opium of the people, but the vitamin of the weak.

Cultural assertion follows material success; hard power generates soft power.

Today China's economic power," Richard Nixon observed in 1994, "makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable.

The West is the only civilization which has substantial interests in every other civilization or region and has the ability to affect the politics, economics, and security of every other civilization or region.

The distribution of cultures in the world reflects the distribution of power. Trade may or may not follow the flag, but culture almost always follows power.

Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are.

When asked in 1994, for instance, which nation would have the greatest influence in Asia in the twenty-first century, 44 percent of the Japanese public said China, 30 percent said the United States, and only 16 percent said Japan.42 Japan, as one high Japanese official predicted in 1995, will have the "discipline" to adapt to the rise of China. He then asked whether the United States would. His initial proposition is plausible; the answer to his subsequent question is uncertain.

Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.

The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

But it is pretty to see what money will do.

Hanem ezentúl kevésbé tisztelem a királyokat, látva, hogy az es?nek ?k sem tudnak parancsolni.

Things have made you what you are," she recited "What you are will make you what you will become.

The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions.

That seemed to be, if anything, the power of writing—to hold sway over memory, making it public, keeping it private, possibly, even, keeping it secret from oneself—