Quotes About Influence

Language is power. When you turn "torture" into "enhanced interrogation," or murdered children into "collateral damage," you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.

Too, the elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.

We think we tell stories, but stories often tell us, tell us to love or to hate, to see or to be blind. Often, too often, stories saddle us, ride us, whip us onward, tell us what to do, and we do it without questioning. The task of learning to be free requires learning to hear them, to question them, to pause and hear silence, to name them, and then to become the storyteller.

So the threads of ideas weave around the world and through the decades and centuries.

Toda a gente é influenciada por coisas que precedem a educação formal, que saem do nada e da vida do dia a dia. A essas influências excluídas chamo avós.

Photographs and essays and novels and the rest can change your life; they are dangerous.

The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers often resonate most.

Everyone is influenced by those things that precede formal education, that come out of the blue and out of everyday life.

seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head.

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.

Gonzalez adds, "Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models. We are by nature optimists, if optimism means that we believe we see the world as it is. And under the influence of a plan, it's easy to see what we want to see.

The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.

Secondo me le basi della speranza sono, semplicemente: ignorare cosa succederà e sapere che l'improbabile e l'inimmaginabile accadranno con una certa regolarità. E che la storia non ufficiale nel mondo mostra come l'impegno degli individui e i movimenti popolari possano influenzarla e ottenere qualcosa, anche se non si può prevedere come e se ce la faremo, né quanto tempo ci vorrà.

We'd never set eyes on each other before. But that's the work that books do, reaching out further than their writers.

when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they're more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent.

We are all the heroes of our own stories, and one of the arts of perspective is to see yourself small on the stage of another's story, to see the vast expanse of the world that is not about you, and to see your power, to make your life, to make others, or break them, to tell stories rather than be told by them.

People would ask the question, 'How do we keep these very powerful men from being so abusive. And I was like, 'I don't think we're going to stop them from being so abusive, so let's stop them from being so powerful.

Perhaps it's not that knowledge is power, but that some knowledge has power and some is stripped of the power it deserves. The powerful lack the knowledge; the knowledge lacks the power.

I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.

Honestly, Edythe, Mama says, like she's going to give her the most important advice in the world, If you continue acting this way, you will be unpopular for the rest of your life. I wish I could go someplace far away

Looking up at her, Teensy said, Any baggage you have, Bébé, ceased to be only yours the minute that sperm hit that egg.

I will be­lieve that the bat­tle of fem­i­nism is over, and that the fe­male has reached a po­si­tion of equal­ity with the male, when I hear that a coun­try has al­lowed it­self to be turned up­side-down and led to the brink of war by its pas­sion for a to­tally bald woman writer.

These signs and tokens are of no small value; they speak a universal language and act as a passport to the attention and support of the initiated in all parts of the world. They cannot be lost so long as memory retains its power….