Quotes About Influence

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

Texan bluntness by Lyndon Johnson: with a certain kind of man, you'd rather have him 'on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in

As I liked him less and less I became more and more like him. I felt trapped, didn't care for myself.

I have witnessed the pleasant result of producing a human who faithfully claims to be a Christian, but who on some fundamental level does not think Christianity actually works. And just one Christian of this type turns off dozens from trying out Christianity for themselves.

Besides, these box-checking Christians having such a majority is largely in our favor. Their ubiquity is inversely proportional to their efficacy.

If we blind them to The Adversary —decrease their desire for The Desire— while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing "freedom of choice," then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

We are puppets, pulled by a wire by unknown forces; nothing, nothing ourselves!

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

Man is a gregarious animal and much more so in his mind than in his body. A golden rule; judge men not by their opinions but by what their opinions have made of them.

Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest.

We say that someone occupies an official position, whereas it is the official position that occupies him.

The greatest things in the world are brought about by other things which we count as nothing: little causes we overlook but which at length accumulate

El único defecto de los escritores realmente buenos es que casi siempre ocasionan que haya muchos malos o regulares.

No es extraño que quienes dominan al género humano ocupen un rango tan superior al de quienes lo educan? Esto revela hasta qué punto el hombre es un animal esclavo.

The masses are only to be regarded as one of three things: either as copies of great personalities, bad copies, clumsily produced in a poor material, or as foils to the great, or finally as their tools.

Judging from the ugly and repugnant things that are sometimes in vogue, it would seem as though fashion were desirous of exhibiting its power by getting us to adopt the most atrocious things for its sake alone.

Every relationship between persons causes a picture of each to take form in the mind of the other, and this picture evidently is in reciprocal relationship with that personal relationship.

Every communication is rhetorical because it uses some technique to affect the beliefs, actions, or emotions of an audience.

The guy that made me wanna make movies... and this is off the wall-is a guy named Michael Pal, the British director.

On the other side of that coin, and far outweighing it, is the fact that I've been able to use genre of Fantasy/Horror and express my opinion, talk a little about society, do a little bit of satire and that's been great, man. A lot of people don't have that platform.

Power and position often make a man trifle with the truth.

Every man is the architect of his own fortunes, but the neighbors superintend the construction.

Some are born great; some achieve greatness, and others have it pinned on them.