Quotes About Influence

when you haven't got the numbers, be vicious. It's called minority politics.

Already in antiquity, Jews had developed a romance with cities, whose size offered them a range of religious, economic, and social opportunities that smaller rural locales did not. In the Middle Ages, Jews played an important role as agents sent by host

Alexander the Great established the Egyptian city of Alexandria, which become the world center of Hellenistic culture. It was also the site of the largest Jewish urban concentration in the world in antiquity; estimates range from 500,000 to 1 million Jewish residents in the first century ce. Alexandria was not only significant in demographic terms. It was also a site

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

Manners matter as this author memorably illustrates. Eleanor Roosevelt stubbornly kept her clout behind Adlai Stevenson was an almost visceral resistance to John F. Kennedy's charms as a newcomer to power. The sudden death of Eleanor's granddaughter shortly before JFK was to meet with her suggested that rapprochement was impossible. Kennedy's genuine gentle manners toward the grieving former first lady won her over and may have shifted the balance in an extremely close election.

Nixon wanted view and advice brought to him through intermediaries. He wanted information filtered as it came to him – and he wanted his filters to filter his will back to those whom he must direct.

While JFK had made the sale on a political level, he had not yet completed it on an emotional one.

No matter what office LBJ assumed he lifted greater than when he found it.

Truman makes friends without influencing people. Dewey influences people without making friends. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

It is as though when we are in the proximity of the auras of people with certain capacities, some transfer of ability can take place. Simply put, we are either positively or negatively influenced by the company we keep. It is unlikely that we will overcome an inhibition if we choose to be in the company of others who have our same problem.

That which we want, desire, and insist upon from another person is felt by them as pressure. They will, therefore, unconsciously resist.

If you can't regulate your own emotional temperature, you'll regulate everyone around you to keep yourself comfortable.

Weak people are destructive; powerful people are constructive. Powerful people create, facilitate, and make things happen.

Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.

I hated leaving a hole in the smoking world, and so I recruited someone to take my place. People have given me a lot of grief, but I'm pretty sure that after high school, this girl would have started anyway, especially if she chose the army over community college.

A person doesn't consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

mates, to my sisters and me, are seen mainly as shadows of the people they're involved with. they move. They're visible in direct sunlight. But because they don't have access to our emotional buttons-- because they can't make us twelve again, or five, and screaming-- they don't really count as players.

Use the word "y'all," and before you knew it, you'd find yourself in a haystack French-kissing an underage goat. Along with grits and hush puppies, the abbreviated form of you all was a dangerous step on an insidious path leading straight to the doors of the Baptist church.

Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires.

A lot of our outlawed terms were invented by black people and then picked up by whites, who held on to them way past their expiration date. 'My bad,' for example, and 'I've got your back' and 'You go, girlfriend.' They're the verbal equivalents of sitcom grandmothers high-fiving one another, and on hearing them, I wince and feel ashamed of my entire race.

All I can say is that if it helps to have friends, it helps even more to have friends who are governors!

I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.

Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they'll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you've changed into that very simple shape.

I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of people I've never even met.