Quotes About Influence

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.

In the same way many Christians--whole generations of them, sometimes entire denominations--have in their possession a book which will do a thousand things not only in and for them but through them in the world. And they use it to sustain only three or four things they already do.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

When God does the big things, the little people get drawn in too. Human systems often forget that, but God doesn't.

you become like what you worship;

Paul does not quote the Psalms or Isaiah, but we can see the influence of their double vision of the One God all the way through: the sovereign God, high above and beyond the earth so that its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, yet gently at hand, gathering the lambs in his arms and leading the mother sheep.

In what sense is the Bible authoritative in the first place? How can the Bible be appropriately understood and interpreted? How can its authority, assuming such appropriate interpretation, be brought to bear on the church itself, let alone on the world?

There are many parts of the world we can't do anything about except pray. But there is one part of the world, one part of physical reality, that we can do something about, and that is the creature each of us calls "myself.

Despite what skeptics and critics sometimes say, followers of Jesus have transformed the world in all sorts of ways in the last two thousand years. It was Jesus's followers, after all, who went about caring for the poor, tending the sick, and providing education for people of all sorts (not only the rich or the elite). There is no reason why Jesus's followers should not continue this work and every reason why they should.

The church must, in short, learn from Jesus before Pilate how to speak the truth to power rather than for power or merely against power.

But if Christians don't get Jesus right, what chance is there that other people will bother much with him?

In Britain, more people now vote on "reality TV" shows (voting, for instance, to eject a contestant from a "Big Brother" house) than vote in elections.

In the United States, whoever you vote for, you still get a millionaire.

You become like what you worship. When you gaze in awe, admiration, and wonder at something or someone, you begin to take on something of the character of the object of your worship.

I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.

History is the third parent.

tarikh,siasate gozashte,va siasat,tarikhe hal ast

I believe that you should gravitate to people who are doing productive and positive things with their lives.

Power is something of which I am convinced there is no innocence this side of the womb.

If you want to move people, you look for a point of sensitivity, and in Egypt nothing moves people as much as religion.

Leadership is the absence of self interest

A queen keeps a court that is spoken about. A goddess keeps a court that is never forgotten.

You have the power to tear me to pieces, to wound me so deep and true that I'll never recover.