Quotes About Influence

But shouldn't they still act like children? They aren't normal. They act like--history. Napoleon and Wellington. Caesar and Brutus.

who would expect less? she said. You're a Wiggin. Whatever that means. He said. It means that you are going to make a difference in the world.

You get all the pleasures of the puppeteer.

Val, said Mother, goodness trumps greatness any day. Not in the history books, said Valentine. Then the wrong people are writing history, aren't they? said Father.

A real god doesn't care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.

Achilles acted as if he had already won, and because the other kids followed him, he had.

He was only a child, doing what adults led him to do; but somewhere in his heart he knew that even a child is a real person, that a child's acts are real acts, that even a child's play is not without moral context.

He can have friends. It's parents he can't have.

Because these fools always look up for power. People above you, they never want to share power with you. Why you look to them? They give you nothing. People below you, you give them hope, you give them respect, they give you power, cause they don't think they have any, so they don't mind giving it up.

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: Tut-tut, what at botch that was? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

Once you realize that power will always end up with the sort of people who crave it, I think that there are worse people who could have it than Peter.

There are hundreds of possible causes for every effect, and a hundred possible effects for every cause.

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to be controlled by good people, by people who love you.

We're all tools in somebody's kit. But that doesn't mean we can't make tools out o other people. Or figure our interesting things to use ourselves for.

The loneliness of power.

You accomplish exactly as much as the people who serve you decide you'll accomplish, and nothing more.

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side. 

And it occurred to me that what we professors think of as a 'brilliant student' is nothing but a student who is enthusiastically converted to whatever idiotic ideas we've been teaching them.

There are so many powerful people in this world who refuse to see any vision they didn't think of.

To stop a human being from doing something, you must find a way to make the person stop wanting to do it.

How did I become the one to make this decision for everyone?

the point is, there are times when the world is in flux and the right voice in the right place can move the world

There are many steps on the continuum between controlling something and doing nothing at all.

Is it some law of human nature that you inevitably become whatever your first commander was? I can quit right now, if that's so.