Quotes About Influence

The age of our fathers, which was worse than that of our ancestors, produced us, who are about to raise a progeny even more vicious than ourselves.

Whatever good there is in small boys is usually based upon their admiration for girls of their own age.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music, and of aviation.

From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.

It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.

There are some men who lift the age they inhabit, till all men walk on higher ground in that lifetime.

There are few things that we so unwillingly give up, even in advanced age, as the supposition that we still have the power of ingratiating ourselves with the fair sex.

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

Setting a good example for your children takes all the fun out of middle age.

There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone, without exception, has weaknesses.

You live in the age of interdependence. Borders don't count for much or stop much, good or bad, anymore.

Any young man who is unmarried at the age of twenty one is a menace to the community.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty; he is always in allegiance to the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.

The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

What luck for the rulers that men do not think.

It's funny the way most people love the dead. Once you're dead, you're made for life.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.

I was sued by a woman who claimed that she became pregnant because she watched me on television and I bent her contraceptive coil.

What matters is not the length of the wand, but the magic in the stick.

A genius can't be forced; nor can you make an ape an alderman.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.