Quotes About Influence

Cicero's eloquence, even if only half understood, still informs the language of modern politics.

The woman who can whisper in her husband's ear wields more power de facto, or rather is often alleged to, than the colleagues who can only send official requests and memos.

He divided the people in this way to ensure that voting power was under the control not of the rabble but of the wealthy, and he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power – a principle that we should always stand by in politics.

Polybius more than 150 years earlier

Lord Palmerston and John F. Kennedy proudly broadcast the Latin phrase Civis Romanus sum ('I am a Roman citizen') as a slogan for their times.

To put it another way, the individual rich voter had far greater voting power than his poorer fellow citizens.

At a very rough guess there might have been between 1.5 and 2 million slaves in Italy in the middle of the first century BCE, making up perhaps 20 per cent of the total population. They

Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say.

Who could be so indifferent or so idle that they did not want to find out how, and under what kind of political organisation, almost the whole of the inhabited world was conquered and fell under the sole power of the Romans in less than fifty-three years, something previously unparalleled?' Who indeed?

He spotted, for example, the importance of religion, or 'fear of the gods', in controlling Roman behaviour

The secret, Polybius suggested, lay in a delicate relationship of checks and balances between consuls, the senate and the people, so that neither monarchy nor aristocracy nor democracy ever entirely prevailed.

he saw to it that the greatest number did not have the greatest power – a principle that we should always stand by in politics.

The more power flaunts itself in your face, the more it risks undermining its claims to be taken seriously. Ancient viewers were not all naïve consumers of any message that was thrown at them. Even if some would have looked on these statues in awe and wonderment, it is a fair guess that others would have walked by and laughed, or even spat. In the end, images of power are only as powerful as those who view them allow them to be.

To ignore the Romans is not just to turn a blind eye to the distant past. Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2,000 years, it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it. The

Greece, once conquered, conquered her savage victor and brought culture into the rough land of Latium' (better in Latin: 'Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio').

In short, as the last part of this chapter reveals, the empire created the emperors – not the other way round. Governors

Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit. 'Fierce Rome', that is, 'had been captured by captive Greece.

You can't catch a creature like that anymore than you can catch a person. You can only create an environment they might want to live in. The rest is up to them.

Mothers always knew what was best for their children, and it was a mother's duty to steer the child back onto the right track, especially if said child had gone astray—

There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars.

Both within the family and without, our sisters hold up our mirrors: our images of who we are and of who we can dare to become.

There is nothing enduring in life for a woman except what she builds in a man's heart

What is uttered from the heart alone, Will win the hearts of others to your own.

Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.