Quotes About Influence

The most powerful ideologies are not those that prevail against all challengers but those that are never challenged because in their ubiquity they appear as nothing more than the unadorned truth.

Not everything written by mainstream scholars serves the powers that be, but very little of it challenges such powers.

when you're angry and filled with hate for someone, he's in your head; he owns you.

cultural change occurs whenever a new meme is introduced and catches on. It might be romanticism or double-entry book-keeping, chaos theory or Pokemon. So where in the world do new memes come from? sometimes they spring full-blown from the brains of artists or scientists, advertising copywriters or teenagers. often a process of mutation is involved in the creation of a new meme, in much the same way that mutations in natural environment can lead to useful new genetic traits.

Perhaps as the sway of tradition in our eating decisions weakens, habits we once took for granted are thrown up in the air, where they're more easily buffeted by a strong idea or a breeze of fashion.

Yet in general all writers can really do is lift a sensitive finger to the cultural breeze and sense a coming change in the weather; very seldom do they actually change it themselves.

the critical influence of "set" and "setting." Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

The loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate over psychedelics in the 1960s were precisely the people who knew the least about them.

great writers stamp the world with their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear Huxley's indelible imprint.

Sigmund Freud said we act out our own dreams, but if you are only an actor you are not acting out your own dream. You are simply participating in someone else's dream.

The big lesson of Reagan is: To think that he was some sort of simple figurehead and didn't do the thinking and simply read a script in front of him woefully underestimates him. Ronald Reagan was an extremely intelligent person with a real V8 engine under his hood.

Being 15, I feel like people want me to go down the Justin Bieber, Cody Simpson sort of genre.

I love Ashford & Simpson, and I love the Brothers Gibb. They are amazing.

Artists such as Lorna Simpson, Zoe Leonard, Byron Kim and Stephen Andrews and I are around the same age, and I know them personally. The discussions I have had with them over the years have influenced the work that I have made throughout my career.

I always try to emulate those I admire. Pamela Harriman, Coco Chanel, Wallis Simpson, Jean Harlow, Diana Vreeland.

It's never happened in history that every region in the world could affect every other region simultaneously. The Roman empire and the Chinese empire didn't know much about each other and had no means of interacting. Now we have every continent able to reach every other.

We live in a media world simultaneously obsessed with technology and personality.

The truth doesn't lie. It's up in your face. It's in your conscience. It challenges your very being with the intention of cleaning you of sin and its influence.

I played on a few Frank Sinatra sessions.

I couldn't get away from the gramophone. It was the only thing that I ever really liked, and I was singing along by the time I was five years old - to the Modernaires and Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole.

Some of my other heroes around that time were, oddly enough, Frank Sinatra, Nat Cole and people like that - I was always more inclined to listen to ballads.

There will never be another Frank Sinatra. I never wanted to be another Frank Sinatra. I only wanted to be another Michael Buble.

I'm very happy to have people say I sound like Frank Sinatra.

The artist that had the biggest impact on me was Michael Jackson. He was my Elvis and Beatles. When I was 15, I listened to a lot of Sinatra, but my jean jacket didn't have, 'I love Frank' on it, it had, 'I love AC/DC', 'Guns N Roses', 'Pearl Jam'. I thought Eddie Vedder was the second coming.