Quotes About Influence

We're bound to be proud of the way our children turn out if they see nothing unseemly and hear nothing shameful. They, like us, will live in the light of all that's good, and their virtue—like ours—will be their strength.

Most of all I vowed that my followers would learn more from my own example than from any legal code or set of regulations. As important to the people as written laws may be, the leader serves as a living law. He not only acts as a competent guide but also functions as a wise judge, detecting and punishing those who fail to serve the people with justice and honesty.

Glaucon, the son of Ariston, had conceived such an ardour to gain the headship of the state that nothing could hinder him but he must deliver a course of public speeches, though he had not yet reached the age of twenty. His friends and relatives tried in vain to stop him making himself ridiculous and being dragged down from the bema. Socrates, who took a kindly interest in the youth for the sake of Charmides the son of Glaucon, and of Plato, alone succeeded in restraining him.

Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.

With children like this having children of their own, it was no wonder the world was full of children.

In my youth, it was my good luck to have a few good teachers, men and women, who came into my head and lit a match.

In his entirely personal experience of them, English was jazz music, German was classical music, French was ecclesiastical music, and Spanish was from the streets. Which is to stay, stab his heart and it would bleed French, slice his brain open and its convolutions would be lined with English and German, and touch his hands and they would feel Spanish.

He seems to be attracting religions the way a dog attracts fleas.

My agency was pure and miraculous. It conferred power upon me.

shelf, stand mountains of neatly stacked cans and packages. A reserve of food to last the siege of Leningrad. CHAPTER 7 It was my luck to have a few good teachers in my youth, men and women who came into my dark head and lit a match.

It is true that those we meet can change us

I can't understand how a man who seems never to read imaginative writing of any kind (novels, poetry, short stories, high-brow, middle-brow, low-brow, anything) can understand life, people, the world. I don't care if ordinary people read or not. It's not for me to say how people should live. But people who have power over me? I want them to read because their limited, impoverished dreams may become my nightmares.

No culture is so primitive that it is entirely determined by the natural influences of environment and economic function, nor yet any is so advanced that it is not conditioned by these influences.

A subculture may possess a very rich intellectual and religious tradition. (...) The Jews have everywhere exerted a considerable cultural influence (...). And since they have often occupied key positions in the dominant cultures - as government officials, court physicians, bankers and merchants, scholars, and men of letters - their influence has been out of all proportion to their numbers.

The great thing about the United States and the historically magnetic effect it has had on a lot of people like me is its generosity, to put it simply.

The advice I've been giving to people all my life - that you may not be interested in the dialectic but the dialectic is interested in you you can't give up politics, it won't give you up - was the advice I should have been taking myself.

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.

Words matter deeply to the authors of Proverbs, for they see words as powerful vehicles of good or evil, just as much so as actual deeds.

One of the architects of what is now the world's only superpower was Thomas Jefferson.

Conservatives sense a link between television and drugs, but they do not grasp the nature of this connection.

Because politics rests on an irreducible measure of coercion, it can never become a perfect realm of perfect love and justice.

While money doesn't buy love, it puts you in a great bargaining position.

You stars that reigned at my nativity, whose influence hath allotted death and hell.

Money can't buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.