Quotes About Influence

All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.

Great lives never go out; they go on.

J.F.K.--The Man and the Airport

Most everything in my brain, someone else helped put there.

Real friends help you succeed while fake friends try to destroy your future

Socrates seems to be the philosophical napkin with which the ensuing cultural thinkers of history wipe their mouths of pedantic ooze.

The best way to sell yourself to others is first to sell the others to yourself. Check yourself against this list of obstacles to a pleasing personality interrupting others sarcasm vanity being a poor listener insincere flattery finding fault challenging others without good cause giving unsolicited advice complaining attitude of superiority envy of others' success poor posture and dress.

There was never in the history of the world a great politician who was not hated by large numbers of inferior men.

What I said never changed anyone. What they understood did.

Too many of today's children have straight teeth and crooked morals.

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

One of the necessary accompaniments of capitalism in a democracy is political corruption.

for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts . . ., on those, she

There is often a great difference between what we want and what we think we want, and this is complicated still further by the fact that we are often greatly influenced by what others want for us

Is your mom afraid something will happen to you?" "I," said Harriet, with absolute confidence, "am something that happens to other people.

Sometimes I wonder who my mother might be if she weren't married to my father. Everyone around him seems that much less free-spirited, that much less open to possibility, so much more controlled. At her office she is loud and filled with infectious laugher. Here she is more quiet and deferential. I can cut a cucumber, I say more sharply than I intend. She winces and busies herself with searching for a vegetable peeler, if only to make a point.

My father and I look up and then at each other. I can feel my heart separate from the rest of my body. I want to hand it to frothing old man in front of me and say, take it. It's yours, because it has always been yours, if not for your sperm, your food, and the school fees that you pay on my behalf, then who and where would I be? Nothing. I am because you are. I say nothing. Each word I search for flies from my brain before I can send it off my tongue.

I have found more fist bumps and handshakes and high fives until someone shouts, wassup my nigga, because drunk white kids think imitating black people is hilarious.

no one ever develops and achieves self-awareness in a vacuum, beyond all ears and systems. The period you grow up in and mature in always influences your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or by evil.

The point I am trying to make is that words are a mysterious, ambiguous, ambivalent, and perfidious phenomenon. They can be rays of light in a realm of darkness. . . . They can equally be lethal arrows. Worst of all, at times they can be one or the other. They can even be both at once!

I have said it so often: if the West does not stabilize the East, the East will destabilize the West.

So-obviously-I am not against political parties; if I were, I would be against democracy itself. I am simply against the dictatorship of partisanship. To be more precise, I am against the excessive influence of parties in the system of political power. Where the political system-and thus the state itself-is too dominated by parties, or too dependent on them, the consequences are unfortunate.

And anyway, no one ever develops and achieves self-awareness in a vacuum, beyond all eras and systems. The period you grow up in and mature in always influence your thinking. This in itself requires no self-criticism. What is more important is how you have allowed yourself to be influenced, whether by good or evil.

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.