Quotes About Influence

The question is, What type of human do I want to be? How do I want to use my platform? Do I want to be safe, under the umbrella of my white privilege? Or do I want to push back and resist?

Ultimately, I think there's this umbrella term of jazz, and what's cool about not just what's happening with my music but this general sense of what's happening with this generation of musicians, is it's a very broad term, and we can incorporate all types of music, and we can be influenced and inspired by all kinds of sounds.

I was playing a lot of Coldplay before the world knew who I was, before anybody knew my 'Umbrella' song. Those songs still stick in my head. I just love it. It's without pop culture, it's just a song. It's just singing.

Bishops are like umpires. You have to have them to call the close decisions.

It's very un-American to say nice things about elites. Elites are often terrible. It's not like we've ever had a perfect set of benevolent democratic elites ruling over our country. But the fact of the matter is that a representative system of democracy delegates power to elites.

I feel 95 per cent of Indian boys are mama's boys and a few of them couldn't come out of their mother's shadows. Salman Khan is one of them. I feel one of the reasons he is unable to find a soul mate is he looks for his mother in every girl.

When national policy becomes hostage to regional interests, the federal government becomes paralysed and would be unable to act in the larger national interest.

With our Paleolithic instincts, we're simply unable to resist technology's gifts. But this doesn't just compromise our privacy. It also compromises our ability to take collective action.

You know my mother during her lifetime was unable to set up a foundation for the arts. She always had that idea and did help the arts in many other ways but never was able to set up her own foundation, so we did it in her name after her passing.

It follows from what we have just said, that the natural changes of monads come from an internal principle, since an external cause would be unable to influence their inner being.

I will barnstorm American living rooms. Mainstream media will be unable to ignore me, but more importantly they will be unable to overlook the needs of average Americans in the run-up to the 2012 election.

The Tories seem unable to make any impact north of the border.

Madonna is a creation, so perhaps we should give her and the factory that created her a little credit, but I think that she should quietly disappear now. Poor Madge seems unable to decide whether she wants to look like Marilyn Monroe or Marlene Dietrich.

In the United States, the world's most important democracy, Congress seems permanently deadlocked, in hock to moneyed interests, unable to grapple with the big issues of climate change, technological change, the information revolution.

My mother made me listen to Carnatic music saying that only then I will be able to appreciate any good music. But what this has also done for me is that I'm unable to accept modern-day cinema songs.

I guess the first big name I worked with was Sissy Spacek, and that was really interesting just because she's so incredible and I learned so much from just watching her. But she's also so unassuming that I loved working with her. It wasn't like working with a star, it was Sissy. Not a big deal.

I really believed it was important to explain to our young audience that expectations based on people who are trying to sell them things are unattainable.

I think social media is painting an unattainable picture of perfection.

When you fall in love with favourite movie stars, it's not because they're movie stars and unattainable, but because they show you sides of themselves that are extremely personal.

My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.

If you've grown up feeling unattractive, I don't think you ever lose that. It never goes.

I'm very aware I have very young people following me - 11- and 12-year-olds. I want to do things that are aspirational, so I'm not going to pick a picture that's unattractive - even in the sense of lighting and angles - but I make sure that it's realistic. It is me, and it is my body. I wouldn't put anything out there that isn't real.

We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.

Whether we appreciate it or not, we live out our lives surrounded by an intricate pattern of social connections... We're all embedded in this network; it affects us profoundly and we may be unaware of its existence, of its effect on us.