Quotes About Influence

Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody's mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible.

When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face.

Pointsman is finding it much easier to of late to slip into a l'etat c'est moi frame of mind--who else is doing anything?

But as we all know, rock 'n' roll will never die, and education too, as Henry Adams always sez, keeps going on forever.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

Children who drank the milk from the dairy cows who grazed nearby were found leaning against telegraph poles listening to the traffic speeding by through the wires above their heads, or going off to work in stockbrokers' offices where, unsymmetrically intimate with the daily flow of prices, they were able to amass fortunes before anyone noticed.

Hatred of the Jew was sometimes almost beside the point. Modern anti-Semitism really went far beyond feelings, had become a source of energy, tremendous dark energy that could be tapped in to like an electric main for specific purposes, a way to a political career, a factor in parliamentary bargaining over budgets, taxes, armaments, any issue at all, a weapon for prevailing over a business rival in a deal.

All in his life, of what has looked free or random, is discovered to have been under some control. All the time- the same as a fixed roulette wheel.

Phoebus discovered—one of the great undiscovered discoveries of our time—that consumers need to feel a sense of sin. That guilt, in proper invisible hands, is a most powerful weapon.

Charter'd Companies may indeed be the form the world has now increasingly begun to take.

Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. The word has ceased to have meaning.

The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator.

How does one man get the power to make the rest see in themselves what he sees in them?

Everyone may be called comrade, but some comrades have the power of life and death over other comrades.

Ronald Reagan had a vision of America. Barack Obama has a vision of Barack Obama.

No one chooses which culture to be born into or can be blamed for how that culture evolved in past centuries.

It is scary how easily so many people can be brainwashed by sheer repetition of a word.

teachers who pander to minority students by turning their courses into rap sessions and ethnic navel-gazing exercises capture their interest and allegiance.

In short, the anointed are helped to make yet another group feel like victims and to regard the anointed as their rescuers.

As George J. Stigler said of some of his fellow Nobel Laureates, they "issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes on no other basis.

Piketty's crucial misstep is verbally converting a fluid process over time into a rigid structure, with a more or less permanent top one percent living isolated from the rest of society that is supposedly subjected to their control or influence. It is a vision divorced from demonstrable facts, however consonant it may be with prevailing preconceptions.

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear. People with careers as ethnic leaders usually tell their followers what they want to hear.

Choice, like behavior and performance, is often circumvented by the vocabulary of the anointed.

That decades had to pass before a mistake with obvious negative consequences began to be corrected is one sign of the problems of decisions by third parties who pay no price for being wrong.