Quotes About Influence

Stalin impressed Trotsky, whose description reveals why he lost their struggle for power. 'Stalin was very valuable behind the scenes,' he wrote. 'He did have the knack of convincing the average run

When you explain to people what you're trying to do, as opposed to just making demands or delegating tasks, you can build instant trust, even if it's just for that short time you're on the phone.

The passions we cannot control are the ones that define us.

Whether you know it or not, we leave parts of ourselves wherever we go.

The present grows within the boundaries of the past.

It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have imagined them so vividly. There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet.

In a sense we are all prisoners of some memory, or fear, or disappointment—we are all defined by something we can't change.

You can't carry the blame for others or their future consequences. None of us can. That's the road to self-destruction.

The city is the teacher of the man.

All the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in point of fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them.

I don't want to point out her flaws, but if I see her going on a self-destructive path, isn't it up to me as her friend to stop her?

I want to live life on my own terms. But I'm Mexican, so mi familia is always there to guide me in everything I do, whether I want them to or not. Well, "guide" is too weak a word. "Dictate" is more like it.

I don't want to end up like my mom. That's my biggest fear in life.

Didn't you learn anything from my mistakes?" he asks. Shit, when Alex was in the Latino Blood back in Chicago I worshiped him. "You don't want to hear my answer to that.

The fact is that a mere nothing, a thought, a whim, a particle of dust can change the course of a life.

To get power over is to defile. To possess is to defile.

Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, even a duty.

Man alone can enslave man.

To write the lives of the great in separating them from their works necessarily ends by above all stressing their pettiness, because it is in their work that they have put the best of themselves.

Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.

Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors who when their turn comes, will manufacture professors.

The city is teacher of the man.

realized that this country has gone so flabby that any gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to seem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin' women they want.

He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason