Quotes About Influence

Microprocessing reduces the size that groups must stain in order to be effective in the use and control of violence.

There is a striking analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and that of today, when the world has become saturated with politics.

The Information Revolution will destroy the monopoly of power of the nation-state as surely as the Gunpowder Revolution destroyed the Church's monopoly.

The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.

Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.

When weapons or tools of production can be effectively hoarded or monopolized, they tend to centralize power.

As we tried to instill in each of our subjects over and over, WICKED is good.

THOMAS, YOU'RE THE REAL LEADER

it was impossible to get into—unless you were extremely rich, famous, or high up on the criminal chain. Or, of course, a politician, which would make you all of the above.

If you really did help design the Maze, Tommy, it's not your fault. You're a kid—you can't help what they forced you to do.

when you were barely five years old you begged me to let you read that Stephen King novel and I made you stick to Judy Blume.

THOMAS IS THE REAL LEADER

People still believe what the SQ tells them to believe. Because fear is always more powerful than truth.

Oh, if Plato could see me now ! Aristotle, traveler of time!

idealism misconstrues agency, implying the capacity to bring about influence where that capacity may not exist or where it may only be weak.

culture is as much an infrastructure as it is ideas.

idealism ignores the way culture is generated,

culture is not neutral in relation to power but a form of power.

The cultural capital American Christianity has amassed simply cannot be leveraged where it matters most.

merely engaging the culture implies the issue and exercise of power.

Where would Christianity be if Jesus got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?

Jimmy Hoffa said, "I know how Jesus must have felt. The fucking pharaohs rose to power on his coattails like the fucking Kennedy brothers are rising on mine." Heshie Ryskind said, "Get your history straight. It was Julius Caesar that did Jesus in.

He used to pimp and pull shakedowns. Now he rode shotgun to History.

I never knew her in life. She exists for me through others, in evidence of the ways her death drove them