Quotes About Influence

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

But then I get to thinking of our mortality and human weakness, remembering there has never been power with purity—anywhere. If you want to be pure, you must stand alone. If you seek to do positive things, achieve something, leave the world a mite better than you found it, then you must choose power and throw some of your purity away. There's no other choice.

Te veel kennis over onszelf doen we op uit de blikken van anderen. Wij vertrouwen eerder op hoe wij gezien worden dan op hoe wij onszelf zien.

Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

The old disease, thought Rubashov. Revolutionaries should not think through other people's minds. Or, perhaps they should? Or even ought to? How can one change the world if one identifies oneself with everybody? How else can one change it? He who understands and forgives -- where would he find a motive to act? Where would he not?

They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled.

the artist rules his subjects by turning them into accomplices.

Ä°nsanlar?n elde edip tutmay? baÅŸarabilecekleri bireysel özgürlüÄŸün miktar? onlar?n politik olgunluÄŸuna baÄŸl?d?r. Gün ortas?nda karanl?k s.164

The Devil is precise; the marks of his presence are definite as stone...

It is the essence of power that it accrues to those with the ability to determine the nature of the real.

What a woman! They broke the mould when they made her.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

They believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us.

Why must everybody like you? Who liked J. P. Morgan? Was he impressive? In a Turkish bath he'd look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well liked.

MONCEAU: It was an absolutely idiotic accident. I was rooming with another actor, a gentile. And he kept warning me to get out. But naturally one doesn't just give up a role like that. But one night I let myself be influenced by him. He pointed out that I had a number of books which were on the forbidden list—of Communist literature—I mean things like Sinclair Lewis, and Thomas Mann, and even a few things by Friedrich Engels, which everybody was reading at one time.

Shakespeare's lines are a nursery of titles for other, better writers: Pale Fire, Exit Ghost, Infinite Jest, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Sound and the Fury, Unnatural Acts, The Quick and the Dead, Against the Polack, To Be or Not to Be, Band of Brothers, Casual Slaughters. At the very least, I have never named one of my books after his stuff.

There is no absurdity so palpable but that it may be firmly planted in the human head if you only begin to inculcate it before the age of five, by constantly repeating it with an air of great solemnity.

Knowledge is power. The devil it is! One man can have a great deal of knowledge without its giving him the least power, while another possesses supreme authority but next to no knowledge.

A spring never free from the pressure of some foreign body at last loses its elasticity; and so does the mind if other people's thoughts are constantly forced upon it.

A constant flow of thoughts expressed by other people can stop and deaden your own thought and your own initiative…. That is why constant learning softens your brain…. Stopping the creation of your own thoughts to give room for the thoughts from other books reminds me of Shakespeare's remark about his contemporaries who sold their land in order to see other countries.

The effect of music is so very much more powerful and penetrating than is that of the other arts, for these others speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.

No child under the age of fifteen should receive instruction in subjects which may possibly be the vehicle of serious error, such as philosophy, religion, or any other branch of knowledge where it is necessary to take large views; because wrong notions imbibed early can seldom be rooted out, and of all the intellectual faculties, judgment is the last to arrive at maturity.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism..

As Epictetus says, Men are not influenced by things, but by their thoughts about things.