Quotes About Influence

Great leaders, like great actors, must be confident, energetic, empathetic, inspirational, credible, and authentic.

Professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise.

You see kids, little boys, practicing the jeers of their television heroes--they shape themselves on such models. It's a strange conformity to what's thrust at them; they adopt it and adapt it and play with it.

People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.

We affect the future of those who come after us almost as much as we affect our own.

common arrangement, but it can be done if you know the right people.

We were aiming for a cross between Kafka and Orwell, which just goes to show how dangerous it can be when your police officers are better read than you are.

THE TROUBLE with the old boy network is you can never be really sure whether it's switched on or not and whether it's operating in your interest or some other old boy's.

We traced a payment from one Antem Sergeyevich Yershov, a mid-tier oligarch,' said Silver. Mid-tier meaning that he was merely obscenely wealthy, rather than functionally an independent nation state in his own right.

It gave me "the eye"—the fearsome gaze that sheepdogs use to keep their charges in line. But I gave it "the look"—the stare that policemen use to keep members of the public in a state of randomized guilt.

When it's still—when it's the cellar of a house, or a ring of mushrooms in a forest or a gun emplacement outside Offenburg—it's called one of two things. If it remains static and unchanging then we call it a despair. If it seeks to extend its influence then it is a malignancy. Or as the Director puts it—a despair will suck you in, but a malignancy is coming to get you.

God bless busybody community matriarchs, and all that sail in them.

The rest of the band faded down to almost nothing while my dad did his best Bill Evans impression — except hopefully without the untreated hepatitis.

we might have been Welsh, in my dad's eyes a fate worse than Scottish.

It's like hypnotism,' I told Warwick, after the two had been dispatched off to drink more coffee. But Warwick wasn't buying. 'Hypnotism doesn't work like that,' she said. 'And that's the way it's not like hypnotism,' I said.

His mum was Filipino

Always look after your people," he said as I noted down the order. "The way you treat them sets an example for the way they treat others.

My father always swore that jazz, like the blues, was born in the muddy water of the Mississippi. My mother swore that it came from the bottle, like all the devil's best work.

Yes, I'm going to be the President of the United States. You know why? You think you can get chicks by being in the movies? You can really get chicks by being the President.

If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.

My mum was raised Jewish, my dad is very scientifically minded, and my school was vaguely Christian. We sang hymns in school. I liked the hymns bit, but apart from that, I can take it or leave it. So I had lots of different influences when I was younger.

It's the price of success: people start to think you're omnipotent.

Words are important he realized, especially in a nation ruled by its media.

If you hear how wonderful you are often enough, you begin to believe it, no matter how you try to resist it.