Quotes About Influence

To acquire immunity to eloquence is of the utmost importance to the citizens of a democracy.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.

Among ourselves (Westerners), the people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forgo ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

You may kill an artist or a thinker, but you cannot acquire his art or his thought. You may put a man do death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by so doing acquire the love which made his happiness.

Passive acceptance of the teacher's wisdom is easy to most boys and girls. It involves no effort of independent thought, and seems rational because the teacher knows more than his pupils; it is moreover the way to win the favour of the teacher unless he is a very exceptional man. Yet the habit of passive acceptance is a disastrous one in later life. It causes man to seek and to accept a leader, and to accept as a leader whoever is established in that position.

The circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances.

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

It is necessary for the average citizen, if he wishes to make a living, to avoid incurring the hostility of certain big men. And these big men have an outlook - religious, moral, and political - with which they expect their employees to agree, at least outwardly.

What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason.

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.....Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion has gone hand-in-hand.

There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances. This interaction throughout the centuries will be the topic of the following pages.

Without being aware that I was following in my father's footsteps, I read, before I went to Cambridge, Mill's Logic and Political Economy, and made elaborate notes in which I practised the art of expressing the gist of each paragraph in a single sentence.

The conception of duty has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own.

The Orphics, unlike the priests of Olympian cults, founded what we may call 'churches', i.e. religious communities to which anybody, without distinction of race or sex, could be admitted by initiation, and from their influence arose the conception of philosophy as a way of life.

Those who have the habit of controlling powerful mechanisms, and through this control have acquired power over human beings, may be expected to have an imaginative outlook towards their subjects which will be completely different from that of men who depend upon persuasion, however dishonest. Most of us have, at some time, wantonly disturbed an ants' nest, and watched with mild amusement the scurrying confusion that resulted.

Los capitalistas, militaristas y eclesiásticos cooperan en la educación, porque el poder de todos ellos depende del prevalecimiento del sentimentalismo y de la excepcionalidad del juicio crítico.

Memory does not prolong the existence of the past; it is merely one way in which the past has effects.

In national politics, where you are one of some twenty million voters, your influence is infinitesimal unless you are exceptional or occupy an exceptional position. You have, it is true, a twenty-millionth share in the government of others, but only a twenty-millionth share in the government of yourself. You are therefore much more conscious of being governed than of governing.

Power is naked when its subjects respect it solely because it is power, and not for any other reason. Thus a form of power which has been traditional becomes naked as soon as the tradition ceases to be accepted. It follows that periods of free thought and vigorous criticism tend to develop into periods of naked power.

It is held that no woman can have a good moral influence unless she is or pretends to be indifferent to the male sex.

Greek history is peculiar in the fact that, except in Sparta, the influence of tradition was extraordinarily weak in Greece; moreover there was almost no political morality.

it was above all to Plutarch that they turned. He influenced profoundly the English and French liberals of the eighteenth century, and the founders of the United States; he influenced the romantic movement in Germany, and has continued, mainly by indirect channels, to influence German thought down to the present day.

There is here a reciprocal causation: the circumstances of men's lives do much to determine their philosophy, but, conversely, their philosophy does much to determine their circumstances