Quotes About Influence

What people say about you, good or bad, is not nearly as important as what you are.

True leadership is the orchestration of truth into action to shine Light into darkness.

True leaders apply law and grace, for those who only apply only law have little influence and those who apply only grace do not influence properly.

Do not mistake a leader's meekness for weakness.

Evil people naturally assume that you will use that power exactly as they would use it.

If pigs could vote, the man with the slop bucket would be elected swineherd every time, no matter how much slaughtering he did on the side.

People's beliefs don't exist in isolation. Everyone's firmly held beliefs exert an enormous pressure on everyone else.

We can wash people in the water all we want, but we can never wash their parents out of their hearts.

We all choose our own teachers, don't we? I wonder if our choice of teacher shows anything about what our lives will be.

Money only buys the illusion of power. Real power is in the force of will will strong enough that others bend to it for its own sake, and follow it willingly. Power that is won through deception will evaporate under the hot light of truth.

I hope I am remembered by my children as a good father.

There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.

I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in a cave eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends.

In 1916, President Wilson drafted the speech in which he declared, "It shall not lie with the American people to dictate to another what their government shall be." His Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote in the margin: "Haiti, S Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama."6 That

It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him. ERASMUS, LETTER

There are no foolproof methods of persuasion, and those that come closest are coercive and dangerous because they override the will rather than convince the mind.

As followers of Jesus, we must not duck the enormity of a simple but shattering fact: with relatively few exceptions, such as some branches of Buddhism, almost all the most militantly secularist societies in history have been the product of Christian societies. The church is a leading spawning ground for atheists.

The Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create. The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger.

In his famous novel 1984, O'Brien states frankly, "The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. . . . The object of power is power.

Biography can overwhelm philosophy in the best of us.

The key to changing the world is not simply being there, but an active, transforming engagement of a singularly robust and energetic kind.

My definition of a "respected" man was one who had succeeded almost completely in hoodwinking people