Quotes About Influence

Astrology is the study of man's response to planetary stimuli.

If we had a man like Paramahansa Yogananda in the United Nations today, probably the world would be a better place than it is. To my knowledge, no one has worked more, has given more of himself, to bind the peoples of India and America together.

Good and positive suggestions should instruct the sensitive ears of children. Their early ideas long remain sharply etched.

To develop will by yourself is extremely difficult. You require an example before you. If you would be an artist, surround yourself with good paintings and artists. If you would be a divine man, surround yourself with spiritual company.

I used to act dumb. It was an act. I am 26 years old, and that act is no longer cute. It is not who I am, nor do I want to be that person for the young girls who looked up to me. I know now that I can make a difference, that I have the power to do that. I have been thinking that I want to do different things when I am out of here. I have become much more spiritual. God has given me this new chance.

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.

I don't think he was ashamed of anything those hands had done—proud of it, in fact—but all the same they were a problem, because they shaped other people's perceptions of him in ways he couldn't control.

My mother's voice and my father's fists are two bookends of my childhood, and they form the basis of my art.

Great words, arranged with cunning and artistry, could change the perceived world for some readers

South Carolina is not a state; it is a cult.

I had the need to be the good master, but definitely the master, no matter what the cost.

My mother saw in 'Gone With the Wind' the text of liberating herself, ... She took 'Gone With the Wind' as the central book in her life, and made it the central book in her family.

I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.

I've written more about my parents than any writer in the history of the world, and I still return to their mysterious effigies as I try to figure out what it all means—some kind of annunciation or maybe even a summing-up They still exert immense control over me even though they've been dead for so long. But I can conjure up their images without exerting a thimbleful of effort.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

It's politics . . . It makes everybody stupid. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean.

He tells me that teaching is the art of theft: of knowing what to steal and from whom.

pervasive part of the island culture

Leadership in today's world has never been so important and at the same time so difficult.

Ultimately leadership boils down to a relationship. High-quality relationships are based on trust—trust of one anothers' competence as well as character.

A net of words, he said at last, is more powerful than a net of rope.

All human cultures, from hunter-gatherers to city slickers, share certain universals in the ways that we, as primates, interact with one another. This social destiny has a profound influence on the way that we relate to our dogs.

Any individual who truly has a lot of social status has enough power that he or she doesn't need to use force.

Patricia Brennan Demuth