Quotes About Influence

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the 'profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality'.

has profoundly modified the whole trend of modern civilisation, imposing her thought, her standards, her literary forms, her imagery, her visions and dreams wherever she is known. But Germany is the supreme example of her triumphant spiritual tyranny. The Germans have imitated the Greeks more slavishly: they have been obsessed by them more utterly…

Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, William Shakespeare, and Michelangelo Buonarroti stand together at the peak of Western culture.

Harvard Business Review that he said reminded him of me. The article—"Parables of Leadership" by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne—was composed of a series of ancient parables that focused on what the authors called "the unseen space of leadership.

If children are fated to live out the unfulfilled dreams of their parents

Leadership is not about forcing your will on others. It's about mastering the art of letting go.

One thing I've learned as a coach is that you can't force your will on people. If you want them to act differently, you need to inspire them to change themselves.

After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Invisible threads are the strongest ties.

I added that Red Holzman used to say that "the real mark of a star was how much better he made his teammates.

After years of experimenting, I discovered that the more I tried to exert power directly, the less powerful I became. I learned to dial back my ego and distribute power as widely as possible without surrendering final authority.

There is a] growing conviction that quantum mechanics is at root a theory not of tiny particles and waves but of information and its causative influence. It's a theory of how much we can deduce about the world by looking at it, and how that depends on intimate, invisible connections between here and there.

For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them.

The existence of a majority logically implies a corresponding minority.

Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.

Am I racially kin to this man? Baynes wondered. So closely so that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? And—how many of us do know it?

Sometimes I think this planet is under a spell, Elias said. We are asleep or in a trance, and something causes us to see what it wants us to see and remember and think what it wants us to remember and think. Which means we're whatever it wants us to be. Which in turn means that we have no genuine existence. We're at the mercy of some kind of whim.

You put on a bishop's robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you're a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? he asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

She makes life over, he realized. She controls life, whereas I just sit on my can and let it happen to me.

The greatest power one human being can exert over others is to control their perceptions of reality, and infringe on the integrity and individuality of their world. This is done in politics, in psychotherapy.

But reality really is a mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos? And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not to be feared.

It was the mob that swept him into office. However, it's unlikely that when more sober elements prevail they'll want to support a cripple and demagogue who depends on inflaming the mass with his lies and spellbinding.

Does she make the heavens fall? Yes, she pulls down everything. Molinari nodded. It's a psionic talent she has... it's called being a woman.

The Mind is not talking to us but by means of us. Its narrative passes through us and its sorrow infuses us irrationally. As Plato discerned, there is a streak of the irrational in the World Soul.