Quotes About Influence

Beware the pull on your heartstrings -- it's often the pursestrings that are actually being reached for.

Sometimes the trail you leave behind you is more important than the path ahead of you.

It was no doubt significant that Mary Beamish should have the novels of Miss Goudge while Piers had those of Miss Compton-Burnett,

Oh, the strange and wonderful things that men could make women do! thought Jane. She remembered how once, long ago, she herself had started to learn Swedish—there was still a grammar now thick with dust lying in the attic; and when she had first met Nicholas she had tried Greek. And now here was her own daughter caught up in the higher flights of Geography! He seemed a nice young man, but that was only the least one could say. Was it also the most?

Her chief work in life was interfering in other people's business and imposing her strong personality upon those who were weaker than herself.

former Confederate leaders had begun to regain political power in the South, staging targeted and effective misinformation campaigns to unseat progressive Blacks like Francis who had managed to secure positions of influence during Reconstruction.

Maybe not. But maybe that's how the world changes, Isaiah. One father, one child, at a time.

Parents have their own dreams—and it's those dreams they're pushing, not yours.

Sure, negotiation techniques and assertiveness skills can easily be learned by taking courses or reading books. But the truth is, if you're going to command more—whether it's a higher fee, more flexible hours, or a corner office—you have to truly believe you're worth it. People will always respond far more to your "vibes" than your words.

In fact, our bodies are never the same--each minute, they undergo changes, even if imperceptible. Eisenstein (2001, 40-41) points out that we have many bodies, which influence our accounts of reality: 'Writing from the body, my body, my different bodies, I have different stories to tell. They are all all of a piece although they are also fragmentary as through each body experience has its own narration (13).

The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.

Dead battles, like dead generals, hold the military mind in their dead grip.

Only Nicky [Nicholas Romanov II], the Czar, was [Kaiser Wilhelm]'s friend, neither clever nor strong like himself, but at least malleable.

Insensitive people are powerful and the thoroughly thick-skinned are the most powerful. They make the best tyrants.

Lewis would have agreed with Oscar Wilde that our past is what we are. We cannot rid ourselves of it.

Arguments can always be found to turn desire into policy.

In a dependent relationship, the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.

Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as "the most flagrant of all passions.

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.

Strong prejudices in an ill-formed mind are hazardous to government.

I will only mention that the independent power of words to affect the writing of history is a thing to be watched out for. They have an almost frightening autonomous power to produce in the mind of the reader an image or idea that was not in the mind of the writer. Obviously they operate this way in all forms of writing, but history is particularly sensitive because one has a duty to be accurate, and careless use of words can leave a false impression one had not intended.

Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway.

The occasions when an individual is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey's speech proved to be one of those junctures by which people afterward date events.

General Gallieni, dining in civilian clothes at a small café in Paris on August 9, overheard an editor of Le Temps at the next table say to a companion, "I can tell you that General Gallieni has just entered Colmar with 30,000 men." Leaning over to his friend, Gallieni said quietly, "That is how history is written.