Quotes About Influence

If you would know a man's good and evil points, you should know the underlings and retainers he loves and employs, and the friends with whom he mixes intimately. If the lord is not correct, none of his friends and retainers will be correct.

I will be a positive influence on others and will encourage them to give their best. I will surround myself with positive people who will also encourage me to be my best.

Among those who are satisfactory in this respect it is desirable to have represented as great a diversity of intellectual tradition, social milieu and personal character as possible.

I think once you're in the public eye, whether you're a boss, a teacher or whatever you do, that you're automatically in the position of role model. You have people looking up to you, so whether you choose to accept it or not is a different question.

Women saw everything, and they thought about everything. The result was wisdom. For men, this was a frightening state of affairs, which is why they insist on holding on to power.

But maybe when you never say a thing, your thoughts spread like mould.

It wasn't the hand a person was dealt that determined the outcome—it was the person holding the cards who made the difference. And he'd laid his cards down long ago. At the foot of the cross.

Every brick laid in the foundation of a life, however meaningfully or haphazardly placed, shaped the whole. He could now see that fact borne out in every branch of study, from mathematics to science, from economics to chemistry. Each part of the equation influenced the whole.

Every foreign force that comes crashing in thinks it's intervening in a country, but it's actually taking sides in an ongoing contest among Afghans about what this country is.

World history is always the story of how "we" got to the here and now, so the shape of the narrative inherently depends on who we mean by "we" and what we mean by "here and now.

Many religions say to their followers, "The world is corrupt, but you can escape it." Islam said to its followers, "The world is corrupt, but you can change it." p.49.

When you realize the awesome power of words, you can change lives.

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

Everyone else we knew growing up is the same: image of their parents, no matter how loud they told themselves they'd be different

Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy's flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person's skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone

I know what the right woman, at the right moment, can do to a man- not that Tessie seemed to have got away scot-free herself. Some people should never meet. The fallout spreads too wide and gets into the ground for much too long.

Today Henry would be running a banana republic with serious border issues and a dodgy nuclear-weapons program.

I think when you're kids, you're less . . . defined? Then you get older and you start deciding what kind of person you want to be, and it doesn't always match up with what your friends are turning into.

Frightened people are obedient–not just physically, but intellectually and emotionally.

You know something?" Frank said, after a moment. "You've got a bad habit of taking too much credit for the stuff other people do around you.

Plenty of people have told me—and several of them even meant it as a compliment—that I have a God-given talent for fucking with people's minds; and what you can do to strangers is nothing compared to what you can do to your very own family.

Chris had cracked the four of them right across. Even after he was gone, the fault line he made had kept widening, deep under the surface, while everything up on top shone beautiful as new. We were just finishing the job he had begun.

Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person's skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone else, bore its way in and feed off that mind too.

You are the sum total of the people you meet and interact with in the world. Whether it's your family, peers, or co-workers, the opportunities you have and the things that you learn all come through doors that other people open for you.