Quotes About Influence

Consciously or not, all parents act in ways that encourage their children to follow in their footsteps.

Force is the only real and unanswerable power. Oftentimes, beings who haven't been duly punished cannot be reasoned with or edified.

Every colored person in this country is enslaved to the fears of whites and to the way those fears influence white behavior.

Whether or not the Mafia was able to make much difference is not easy to judge; resistance to the invaders was certainly greater in the east, where the Honoured Society was a good deal less powerful.

At this time, too, many Mafia bosses were appointed to responsible positions in the administration simply because there was no one else.

We incline to see history through the lives of great men. That inclination blinds us to the real complexity …

Even now I am perhaps not speaking from myself: but from some character in whose soul I now live.

Shakespeare permeated his whole being, and his influence is to be detected not in a resemblance of style, for Shakespeare can have no imitators, but in a broadening view of life, and increased humanity.

What is your opinion of a society that considers Turkey in the Straw to be one of the pillars, as it were, of its culture?

Here in briefest form is the modern political dialectic. It is an unequal contest: the rich and the comfortable have influence and money. And they vote. The concerned and the poor have numbers, but many of the poor, alas, do not vote. There is democracy, but in no slight measure it is a democracy of the fortunate.

out of the pecuniary and political pressures and fashions of the time, economics and larger economic and political systems cultivate their own version of the truth. This last has no relation to reality. No one is especially at fault; what is convenient to believe is greatly preferred.

for the young Louis XV: Philippe II, Duc d'Orléans, was a man who combined a negligible intellect with deeply committed self-indulgence.

Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could assimilate without a sense of chaos and loss.

Most of the students there, he said, don't know what they think. You tell 'em, they'll think it. I plan to tell 'em.

I thought the issue was settled until at the end he said, 'Listen, pal, if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me,' and I lost part of myself to him, and a soaring sense of freedom revealed that this must have been my purpose from the first: to become a part of Phineas.

My aid alone had never seemed to him in the category of help. The reason for this occurred to me as the procession moved slowly across the brilliant foyer to the doors; Phineas had thought of me as an extension of himself.

You didn't shame anybody into anything." "Oh yes I did. I'm good for you that way. You have a tendency to back away from things otherwise.

RAVs (Russians, Arabs, and Villains) who view London as the place to go if you want to buy respectability.

Before Elvis there was nothing.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

Without Jimmy (James) Dean the Beatles would never have existed.

They want to hold onto something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything. They're just jacking off to - it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, okay? I don't need it.

If there hadn't been an Elvis, there wouldn't have been the Beatles.

We insult her everyday on TV And wonder why she has no guts or confidence When she's young we kill her will to be free While telling her not to be so smart we put her down for being so dumb