Quotes About Influence

History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.

It is true that words have power, and one of the things they are able to do is get out of someone's mouth before the speaker has the chance to stop them.

No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence.

I was merely endeavoring to indicate that if we do not grab events by the collar they will have us by the throat. -Lord Vetinari

no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

If you want to change a whole people, then you start with the girls. It stands to reason: they learn faster, and they pass on what they learn to their children.

J.R.R. Tolkien has become a sort of mountain, appearing in all subsequent fantasy in the way that Mt. Fuji appears so often in Japanese prints. Sometimes it's big and up close. Sometimes it's a shape on the horizon. Sometimes it's not there at all, which means that the artist either has made a deliberate decision against the mountain, which is interesting in itself, or is in fact standing on Mt. Fuji.

You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?

He'd been an angel once. He hadn't meant to Fall. He'd just hung around with the wrong people.

One of the hardest lessons in young Sam's life had been finding out that the people in charge weren't in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

Students, eh? Love 'em or hate 'em, you can't hit them with a shovel!

the IQ of a mob is the IQ of its most stupid member divided by the number of mobsters

You had to hand it to the Patrician, he admitted grudgingly. If you didn't, he sent men to come and take it away.

If Not You, Who Else?

Destiny is important, see, but people go wrong when they think it controls them. It's the other way around.

And when the Patrician was unhappy, he became very democratic. He found intricate and painful ways of spreading that unhappiness as far as possible.

Odd thing, ain't it... you meet people one at a time, they seem decent, they got brains that work, and then they get together and you hear the voice of the people. And it snarls.

Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.

Once you gave a thing a name, you gave it life.

They obeyed, as wise men do when a woman puts her foot down . . .

The jurisdiction of a good man extends to the end of the world.

No one remembers the singer. The song remains.

TO CHANGE THE FATE OF ONE INDIVIDUAL IS TO CHANGE THE WORLD.

Nanny Ogg never did any housework herself, but she was the cause of housework in other people.