Quotes About Influence

The American political process with its deep dependence on the need to raise money is a system designed not for the best governance but for the selection of the person who can put up with being humiliated the longest.

Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor

Special interest groups are like terrorists: they test for weakness and exploit fear.

What happened to the Republican Party is that slowly over half a century the kooks and weirdos and social misfits of a conservative ideology started discovering that they could force reasonable people to support unreasonable positions through fear.

The transition of the National Rifle Association is a perfect parable: over a couple of decades, it evolved from a gun-safety education organization to a thuggish gang that rewards those at the top with millions of dollars based on proven ability to muscle elected officials into doing what they mostly know is wrong.

Conspiracies are dominant realities in the world Trump and his followers inhabit.

Compare photographs of Jimmy Swaggart and Donald Trump, and they look like brothers from some strange union of Mardi Gras floats: huge heads, strange colors, balloon bodies, mouths disconnected from brains.

but the truth is that Trump's racism is a direct descendant of William Buckley's early racism.

Not many Americans know Myron Magnet or his work, but they know Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, Lou Dobbs, and an endless stream of professional nuts and cranks who roam the internet selling conspiracies, bitterness, grievance, and anger, in search of an argument.

signed by Bobby Jones.

Grief is as contagious as a yawn.

You can't make someone else do anything, even if you know you're right.

It's hard to keep passing myself off as a grown-up when a piece of me is still six years old and utterly at the mercy of authority.

I'm not saying justice is for sale, but if you have enough money, you can sometimes enjoy the benefits of a short-term lease.

It seemed odd that in Henry's company I'd felt nothing while there, but in the face of Betsy Bowers's cold authority, all my unprocessed sorrow was surfacing. I took

influenced, and I'd be corrupting his

a man's power is not only what he knows it to be, but also what others think it to be.

If you just stick your big toe in the water when it comes to helping someone else, you'll get one big toe's worth of life change.

My mother's life was way too heavy for me.

When I am dust, sing these words over my bones: she was a voice.

I wanted to say, Who am I to do this, a woman? But that voice was not mine. It was Father's voice. It was Thomas'. It belonged to Israel, to Catherine, and to Mother. It belonged to the church in Charleston and the Quakers in Philadelphia. It would not, if I could help it, belong to me.

Be consoled in knowing the world depends upon the small beating in your heart.

And there they were. All these mothers. I have more mothers than any eight girls off the street. They are the moons shining over me.

In the end, the only monument that matters may be the work of love we carve into the lives around us.