Quotes About Influence

Jim Reston: Walking through the crowds of air-kissing politicians, actors and high fliers, it was tough to tell where the politicians stopped and the showbiz started. Maybe, in the end, there is no difference.

One ship sails East, And another West, By the self-same winds that blow, Tis the set of the sails And not the gales, That tells the way we go.

Easygoing, nonmilitant Pop, as at home in Southern California as was Impressionism on the banks of the Seine.

In such paces — the Vancouvers, San Diegos, Portlands, Seattles, and, yes, San Franciscos and Los Angeleses — can we hope for anything more than jazzed-up melding of New York styles or self-conscious lampoons that aspire to kift the curse of provincialism?

I am only the image I can force upon the town.

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Even if nothing illegal occurred, one has to wonder about the political judgment involved. Surely the mere appearance of selling American power and influence to foreign interests should be enough to cause a former US president—and a possible future one—to steer well clear of such potentially

The reality is that most of what happens in American politics is transactional. People look for ways to influence those in power by throwing money in their direction.

Politics in modern America has become a lucrative business, an industry that has less to do with policy and a lot more to do with accessing money and favors. As we will see, bills and regulations are often introduced not to effect policy change, but as vehicles for shaking down people for those money and favors.

Machiavelli declared that it was better to be feared than loved as a leader, but you did not want to be hated. Hatred led to conspiracy. And conspiracy, he warned, could bring down governments.

Complexity is a useful and lucrative method of legal extortion for politicians

In Washington, it is far more important to be feared than loved.

Politicians spend so much time raising money because that is how you win elections.

Nine out of ten times in the House of Representatives, and eight out of ten times in the Senate, the candidate who spends the most money wins.

Raising money is what helps an ambitious member of the House rise in the ranks far more than ideas or competence.

They were directed to hire certain well-connected advisers and lobbyists in Washington. "You hear about bribery in China," says Herbold. "They have nothing on us. We are just more sophisticated about it.

But the problem is not just with accumulated power, but also with those who seek it. As scientist and author David Brin pointedly noted, "It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible.

If our holding certain values had no effect at all on what we chose to do, values would lose all their importance. Now

The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency. . . . At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. —W. E. H. LECKY, The History of European Morals

To learn how to read any map is to be indoctrinated into that mapmaker's culture.

Every map intends not simply to serve us but to influence us.

In fact, the most important influence predicting a person's level of generalized trust is the attitude of his parents.84 And that would make generalized trust a culturally transmitted trait. Lorenzo

We are bombarded with the pellmell religious convictions of footballers, pop-singers, actors playing new parts for old money, politicians and the rest, moral perverts all, masquerading as mixed up souls who get the message in time.

Nearly our entire intellectual education originates from the Greeks. A thorough knowledge of their origin is the indisputable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence.