Quotes About Influence

We affect one another quite enough merely by existing. Whenever the stars cross, or is it comets? fragments pass briefly from one orbit to another. On rare occasions there is total collision, but most often the two simply continue without incident, neither losing more than a particle to the other, in passing.

By the time a man gets to be presidential material, he's been bought ten times over.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.

I say, they [those at the top] don't have to conspire, because they all think alike. The president of General Motors and the president of Chase Manhattan Bank really are not going to disagree much on anything, nor would the editor of the New York Times disagree with them. They all tend to think quite alike, otherwise they would not be in those jobs.

Our form of democracy is bribery, on the highest scale.

It was of course Jefferson's gift at one time or another to put with eloquence the "right" answer to every moral question. In practice, however, he seldom deviated from an opportunistic course, calculated to bring him power.

To turn life into words is to make life yours to do with as you please, instead of the other way round

say very mildly, we have only one political party in the U.S., the Property Party, with two right wings, Republican and Democrat.

To want power is corruption already.

helped the boy-governor eat the remains of the fruit, they discussed how it was that newspapers sometimes knew all sorts of secrets that they ought not to have known—and certainly ought not to publish, when the rest of the time they had no interest in facts at all. "Whatever sounds as if it might suit the prejudices of the reader, that is what will be published," said Chase.

Ever since 1941, when Roosevelt got us out of the Depression by pumping federal money into rearming, war or the threat of war has been the principal engine to our society. Now the war is over. Or is it? Can we afford to give up our—well, cozy unremitting war?

It is customary for emperors who listen to bishops to hurl insults at the very civilization that created them.

Gewalt! Gewalt! wer kann der Gewalt nicht trotzen? Was Gewalt heisst, ist nichts: Verführung ist die wahre Gewalt.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. Even if we have the happy chance to fall in love, it is because we have been conditioned by what we have read, and if I had never known love at all, perhaps it was because my father's library had not contained the right books.

He was impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance.

It is the earliest dream that I can remember, earlier than the witch at the corner of the nursery passage, this dream of something outside that has got to come in. The witch, like the masked dancers, has form, but this is simply power, a force exerted on a door, an influence that drifted after me upstairs and pressed against windows.

She thought for the first time, with happiness: perhaps I have a life in people's minds when I am not there to be seen or talked to.

The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves. Early reading has more influence than any religious teaching.

It's always the same wherever one goes- it's not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations

If they think you admire them, they will admire you because of your good taste, and when they admire you, you have an illusion for a moment that there's something to admire. All my life I've tried to live that illusion.

She was his like a table or a chair, but a table owned you, too - by your fingerprints.

He can make a woman laugh. Look how Tooley is laughing now. His father was the same. It's the best way, Henry, to win a woman.

A veces pienso que nuestra vida está hecha más por los libros que leemos que por la gente que conocemos: en los libros aprendemos, de segunda mano, qué es el amor y el dolor. Aun cuando tenemos la suerte de enamorarnos es porque nos hemos dejado influir por lo que hemos leído. Si yo no había llegado a conocer el amor, era porque en la biblioteca de mi padre faltaban los libros adecuados.

You can give anyone pain from a distance