Quotes About Influence

The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along.

Natural inclinations are assisted and reinforced by education, but they are hardly ever altered or overcome.

There is no passion so contagious as that of fear.

To an atheist all writings tend to atheism: he corrupts the most innocent matter with his own venom.

For I make others say what I cannot say so well,... I do not count my borrowings, but, weight them.... They are all, or very nearly all, from such famous and ancient names that they seem to identify themselves enough without me.

If I can, I will prevent my death from saying anything not first said by my life.

Whatever it be, whether art or nature, that has inscribed in us this condition of living by reference to others, it does us much more harm than good. We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.

have seen no other effects in rods but to make children's minds more remiss or more maliciously headstrong.

If it lay in my power to make myself feared, I had rather make myself beloved.

when Dandamys the Wise heard accounts of the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras and Diogenes, he said that they were in every way great personalities, except for their being too subject to venerating the Law: for, to support Law with its authority, true virtue must doff much of its original vigour; and many vicious deeds are done not merely with the Law's permission but at its instigation:13

It is as though our very touch bore infection: things which in themselves are good and beautiful are corrupted by our handling of them.

When I quote others I do so in order to express my own ideas more clearly.

EÄŸildiÄŸim yere sürükleniveriyorum: a??rl???m beni ondan yana düÅŸürüyormuÅŸ gibi.

Why may not a goose say thus: All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me; the stars have their influence upon me; I have such an advantage by the winds and such by the waters; there is nothing that yon heavenly roof looks upon so favourably as me. I am the darling of Nature! Is it not man that keeps and serves me?

As Christians, we should spread the love of Christ. If we do our job right, we'll create people who don't want to do wrong.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

The individual is the product of power.

The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body

Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination ...