Quotes About Influence

I'm certain indeed, I think there's no doubt of it - that reading does young people much harm. It puts things into their heads that never would have been there but for books. I declare, I think reading's a very dangerous thing; I'm certain all Mary's bad health is entirely owing to reading. You know we always thought she read a great deal too much for her own good.

Stories are thick with meanings. You can fall in love with a story for what you think it says, but you can't know for certain where it will lead your listeners. If you're telling a tale to teach children to be generous, they may fix instead on the part where your hero hides in an olive jar, then spend the whole next day fighting about who gets to try it first. People take what they need from the stories they hear. The tale is often wiser than the teller.

Criticism is the fountainhead of control.

As long as you continue to react so strongly to them, you give them the power to upset you, which allows them to control you.

Children soak up both verbal and nonverbal messages like sponges—indiscriminately. They listen to their parents, they watch their parents, and they imitate their parents' behavior. Because they have little frame of reference outside the family, the things they learn at home about themselves and others become universal truths engraved deeply in their minds.

Debt is such a powerful tool, it is such a useful tool, it's much better than colonialism ever was because you can keep control without having an army, without having a whole administration.

The corporate and financial worlds want to make the rules but they certainly do not want to be seen making them, or governing anyone.

Those who genuinely want to help the movement should study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless...The poor and powerless already know what is wrong with their lives and those who want to help them should analyse the forces that keep them where they are. Better a sociology of the Pentagon or the Houston country club than of single mothers or inner-city gangs.

Be the most you can be, so life will be more because you were. Susan Glaspell, author

The story of one life cannot be told separately from the story of other lives. Who are we? The question is not simple. What we call the self is part of a larger matrix of relationship and society. Had we been born to a different family, in a different time, to a different world, we would not be the same. All the lives that surround us are in us.

How many small decisions accumulate to form a habit? What a multitude of decisions, made by others, in other times, must shape our lives now.

Men often become what they are told they are. If you repeatedly tell a man he is a slave, he will eventually forget how to think as a free man, although I am optimist enough to hope that there is something in a man that will always remain free.

I was on the way to becoming a duchess, and I had made the Kingmaker angry. What more could a child of seven have accomplished in one day?

Of all the great empires the world has known, ours will be the shortest. Two hundred years of chasing the Godalmighty Dollar, and what do we produce? The A-Bomb and I Love Lucy.

If enough money is involved and enough people believe that two plus two equals five the media will report the story with a straight face always adding a qualifying paragraph noting that mathematicians however say that two plus two still equals four.

The denigration of fairness has infected both political and intellectual life and has now produced a culture in which disproportionate influence is exercised by the loud and relentless voices of single-minded men and women of one persuasion or another.

Sherman: You are the worst. Rick: You taught me everything I know.

I tell you this, madam, no man at court will be able to fart soon without asking Cecil first.

By leaving a power vacuum in the world's darkest hour, the United States has bequeathed China ample room to overreach—and to demonstrate that it is unqualified for a position of sole global leadership."12

The cameras and the studio may not be following me, but my past definitely is.

banker, mayor of Frost—built their turreted

But Dani made him feel like the guy he wanted to be. Trustworthy. Honorable. She wanted him want to be more, to do anything to see respect - even love - in her eyes

Confidence tends to minimize the magnitude of the choice.

memories have no power but what I allow them.