Quotes About Influence

it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.

And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.

The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears.

You said,' Camille protested, 'that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It's true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation.

it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.

Georges told me he would be back, and I have no reason to disbelieve him—but perhaps you'd like to sit down here and write him a letter? Tell him you can't manage the thing without him, which is true. Tell him Robespierre says he can't get along without him. And when you're done, you might go and find Robespierre and ask him to call. He is such a steadying influence when Camille is killing himself.

the wise prince is not always the most popular prince;

He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy toward the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.

Every absent day he loses advantage. If kings do not see you they forget you. Even though nothing in the realm is done without you, kings think they do it all themselves.

I want a job, Lady Carey. It isn't enough to be a councillor, I need an official place in the household." "I'll tell her." "I want a post in the Jewel House. Or the Exchequer." She nods. "She made Tom Wyatt a poet. She made Harry Percy a madman. I'm sure she has some ideas about what to make you.

The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes:

Listen, Cromwell. You don't get a good name among the lowly by sharing their concerns and handing out coin. You get their respect by overlooking them, as if you did not understand their sort, and your own belly had never been empty.' 'I could not so belie myself.

I can remember the days,' Mirabeau said, 'when we didn't have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.

The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

I could have told him what I wanted, and threatened him. But I encouraged him; I did it so that he would be complicit.

A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

he and the cardinal agree it would be better if Luther had never been born, or better if he had been born more subtle.

Hilary Mantel

I so loved the nobility of your character, your wisdom, your chastity, your spirit, and indeed every aspect of your life that many people have said to me: What are you doing?

You know, people make a lot of money talking about me, don't they?

Well, I think, by definition, all power has limits.

It is a fact that around the world the elites of every country are making money.

'Smart power' is the use of American power in ways that would help prevent and resolve conflict - not just send our military in.