Quotes About Influence

She thought secretly that there is no more dangerous item in the world than a pretty young woman on the loose. Luckily, the older woman thought, when we are girls we don't know that we are like sticks of dynamite or like fireworks in a box too close to a fire.

On nous définit encore, même les gens les plus évolués, en fonctions de nos relations avec les hommes.

You won't change her by making fun of her. You just hurt her feelings.

Yet I think we may very well see countries that take it for granted they are democracies losing sight of democracy, for we are living in a time when the great over-simplifiers are very powerful.

Emotion is a trap, it delivers you into the hands of society, that's why people are measuring it out.

Why haven't you been seeing me? A little bird told me that you were all mixed up with the local Reds, and that won't do you any good, Matty dear. Did you know the police go to their meetings? They'll put you in prison one of these days.

These might work, fight, even commit crimes to get "their" representatives into power, but after that they did not consider they had any responsibility for their choices. For a feature, perhaps a predominant feature of the inhabitants of this planet, was that their broken minds allowed them to hold, and act on—even forcibly and violently—opinions and sets of mind that a short time later—years, a month, even a few minutes—they might utterly repudiate.

Ich glaube, dass Literatur – ein Roman, eine Erzählung, sogar eine Zeile aus einem Gedicht – die Macht hat, Reiche zu zerstören. (Schritte im Schatten)

It seems to me that ideas must flow through humanity like tides.

Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel.

The two authors she brought with her from that period of reading were Whitman and Thoreau—but then, she had been reading them for years, as some people read the Bible.

What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on. Some, of course, more than others.

I remember someone saying that the importance of any public man can be gauged by the number of mellifluous young men he has about him.

If a person can be invaded by a personality who isn't theirs, why can't people - I mean people in the mass be invaded by alien personalities.

Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.

The women I loved most in the world horrified me. I did not want to grow up to be them.

So she was on her own, Kate thought, and instilled all the friendly helpfulness she could into her next question. "Excuse me, but are you the bad company young Mr. Scott has got into?

It isn't that music doesn't matter: the reverse, as it happens. So my defences against it are very strong. Can you understand that?

Lymond's life was lived on this level: the level on which the future of whole communities could be steered or reshaped, improved or jeopardized by a handful of people.

Your blasted Nanny should have taught you what mine did,' said Lymond. 'The things you enjoy most aren't good for you.

You lead, therefore you kill.

Why are you here?" Silence. Then the boy said slowly, "Because I admire you.

You're so damned brilliant, said Phelim. You know everything. It's hard-set you'd be to give yourself a dull Saturday afternoon. We're all puppets—not the old Queens only, but the rest of us, man, woman and child, looking the fools of the world. [...] You have them there, on their strings, all curled tight to your littlest finger; and you little heeding as you swing them what soul you may bruise.

Now she was wiser. In this brief and dizzying apprenticeship, she had started to realize that, whatever his occupation, Lymond's life was lived on this level: the level on which the future of whole communities could be steered or reshaped, improved or jeopardized by a handful of people.