Quotes About Influence

To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces...but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate - and expected - action.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

Politics] is always a means of conquering others and exercising power over them.

no one can absolutely control the direction of his life; but each person can certainly influence it. The armchair explorers who complain that they never got their "one lucky shot" were never really infected by the incurable drive to explore. Those who have the bug—go.

Giovanni de' Medici

King, Gandhi, and Kepler become great because they make choices full of moral courage.

Jan Hus. Kepler was part of the funeral

a word once written will often accidentally find a life that no one anticipates; it lies

Women like her looked at their world, rolled up their sleeves, and tried to make it better. Now

It was language, which tyrannizes us all

When Wiktor asked how Miss Trilling had acquired so much knowledge of music, she resumed an earlier explanation which had been interrupted: "I attended a distinguished college in America, Oberlin, where music was important.

With profound shock he realized that of himself he was nothing... By his friends he had been taught to understand music and art and logic and sportsmanship and even the rudiments of honesty. He had been a formless thing until the affectionate interest of others had made him into a sentient being.

You are who you learn from. Choose wisely.

The body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed.

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but his looking glass.

Man is made and unmade by himself. In the armory of thought he forges the weapons which will destroy him. He also creates the tools with which he will build for himself heavenly mansions of joy and strength and peach. Between these two extremes are all the grades of character, and man is their maker and their master.

He thinks in secret, and it comes to pass: environment is but a looking glass.

The more tranquil a man becomes, the greater is his success, his influence, his power for good.

every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought

What you are, so is your world.

Man is buffeted by circumstances so long as he believes himself to be the creature of outside conditions

But do you really mean to say that outward circumstances do not affect our minds?" I do not say that, but I say this, and know it to be an infallible truth, that circumstances can only affect you in so far as you allow them to do so.

A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances. Nature

you are the master of your thought, the molder of your character, and the maker and shaper of your condition, environment, and destiny.