Quotes About Influence

But how many people lighted the path for me? That's the evolution of basketball. There's no way I could have played the way I played if I didn't watch David Thompson and guys prior to me. There's no way Kobe could have played the way he's played without watching me play. So, you know, that's the evolution of basketball. You cannot change that.

Whoever is the team leader of the team, I'm going to be going after him. And I'm not going to do it with my voice.' Because I had no voice. I had no status. I had to do it with the way that I played.

The CIA in its pursuit of intelligence and influence, often courts the same powerful figures [DEA] pursued as criminals . . . and intelligence wins precedence over law enforcement. The highly connected tuxedo-clad criminal is left in place to provide intelligence to the United States—and drugs to its citizens. —James Mills, The Underground Empire

Germans longed to be near shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the current financial crisis.

What I learned playing basketball at Ole Miss, he said, was what not to do: beat up a kid. It's easy to beat up a kid. The hard thing is to build him up.

The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

People no longer are responsible for what happens in the market, because computers make all the decisions.

It said something about the ability of the free marketplace to mold people's behavior into a socially acceptable pattern. For this was capitalism at its most raw, and it was self-destructive.

I hated discussing ideas with investors," he said, "because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process." Once you became an idea's defender you had a harder time changing your mind about it.

the White House converted the position of CDC director from career civil servant to presidential appointee. Since the agency's inception back in 1946, no one had paid much attention to the party politics of the CDC director. ("No one ever asked me," said Foege.) Henceforth the CDC director would not bubble up from inside the CDC, lifted by the approval of his peers, but would be plucked from the supporters of whichever politician happened to occupy the White House.

And [Thaler] noticed that when he had his fellow economists to dinner, they filled up on cashews, which meant they had less appetite for the meal. More to the point, he noticed that they tended to be relieved when he removed the cashew nuts, so they didn't ruin their dinners. The idea that it could make you better off to reduce your choices—that idea was alien to economics.

Which Wall Street big shots Eisman had insulted was a matter of which Wall Street big shots' presence Eisman was allowed into.

This was only one of many recent changes along the capitalist food chain. Wall Street had gone from being the celebrities of the money culture to being its lackeys.

Crucial decisions are made, today as thousands of years ago, in terms of the intuitive guesses and preferences of a few men in positions of authority...[it is] quite likely that the fate of entire societies may be sealed by a series of avoidable mistakes committed by their leaders.

The general idea was to sell their software first to rich technophiles and then, gradually, infiltrate the minds of the middle-class owners of suburban tract houses.

No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.

Wing Chau didn't know he'd been handpicked by Greg Lippmann to persuade Steve Eisman that the people on the other end of his credit default swaps were either crooks or morons, but he played the role anyway.

With every stroke of their keyboards they hacked a path through the forest that others would be required to follow.

It was just eye-opening: to see how much your geography could determine the opportunities available to you.

Your biggest competitive advantage is that you don't want to fuck me.

It's the places in our government where the cameras never roll that you have to worry about most.

What are the odds that people will make smart decisions about money if they don't need to make smart decisions—if they can get rich making dumb decisions? The incentives on Wall Street were all wrong; they're still all wrong.

James Yorke, a professor who had coined the term "chaos theory." The idea was simple: some small, barely noticed event can cascade into huge consequences down the road. (The day your parents met, for instance: what if that hadn't happened?)

This was tricky. They had, right now, at home, boxes of letters addressed to Michael from college football coaches and boosters and just people who wanted to get to know the future star. They had a personal letter from Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who seemed to want to become Michael's friend, and a stack of letters from a football coach at the University of Alabama, who seemed prepared to offer his hand in marriage.