Quotes About Influence

It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written. A chance word, upon paper, may destroy the world. Watch carefully and erase, while the power is still yours, I say to myself, for all that is put down, once it escapes, may rot its way into a thousand minds, the corn become a black smut, and all libraries, of necessity, be burned to the ground as a consequence. Only one answer: write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.

Clean is he alone after whom stream the broken pieces of the city— flying apart at his approaches

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

It's the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this. New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn't make or break a book; it doesn't make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don't read much in New York; they write and talk about what they've written. Don't you worry.

Women can rob a man of sense faster than Appalachian jug whiskey.

I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

I Would Rather Be Governed By the First 2,000 People in the Telephone Directory than by the Harvard University Faculty.

I do not, in short, myself believe it is in the least bit undignified to confess to having been critically influenced in one's thinking by a teacher, or a faculty, or a book; but the accent these days is so strong on atomistic intellectual independence that to suggest such a thing is, as I have noted, highly inflammatory.

Now she hates me. I have taught her that, at least.

As long as I live under the capitalistic system I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.

no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born.

Menfolks listens to somebody because of what he says. Women don't. They don't care what he said. They listens because of what he is.

Then the town was sorry with being glad, as people sometimes are sorry for those whom they have at last forced to do as they wanted them to.

The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.

people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried.

who two thousand years hence will still be throwing triumphantly off the yoke of Latin culture and intelligence of which they were never in any great permanent danger to begin with.

Man the sum of his climatic experiences

Después todos hablaron de lo que harían con veinticinco dólares. Todos hablaban a la vez, insistentes y contradictorias sus voces, convirtiendo lo irreal en posible, luego en probable, después en hecho incontrovertible, como hace la gente al trasnformar sus deseos en palabras.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. --Wm. Faulkner

El lenguaje es como la morfina.

Sometimes i think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.

But those rich town ladies can change their minds. Poor folks cant.