Quotes About Influence

To Richard, in a sense, Mike was a god. He listened to his older cousin's war stories of rape and killing wide-eyed, fascinated beyond normal curiosity. The photos had a profound effect on Richard. They aroused him sexually in a way far more intense than the girlie magazines his brothers had.

Richard had been smoking pot steadily from the time he was ten. His siblings were always lighting up joints in the house, and Richard was quick to pick up the habit. It made him feel grown up. Pot was cheap in El Paso and easy to come by.

Whatever Richard wanted, Doreen secured for him. He was the boss in their relationship. She made sure Richard had money in his commissary account at the jail and sent him books and magazines, writing paper and stamps.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

you are whatever the company you keep is.

Social psychologists have long known that getting people to publicly commit to a belief is a great way to freeze it in place, making it resistant to change. The stronger the commitment, the greater the resistance.

Some people make headlines while others make history.

There are two things that create, protect, and increase a sovereign's rule—soldiers and money—both being dependent on each other. Armies need money and money is acquired by the strength of arms. If you lose one, you lose the other. Caesar

Alexander was and is the absolute embodiment of pure human ambition with all its good and evil consequences.

If you put good apples into a bad situation, you'll get bad apples.

The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. —Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954)

humanity can be transformed by power and by powerlessness. Underlying

recognizing the early signs of toxicity in our leaders can enable us to take preventive medicine, not passively imbibe their seductive poison.33

That seduction or initiation into evil can be understood by recognizing that most actors are not solitary figures improvising on the empty stage of life. Rather, they are often an ensemble of different players, on a stage with various props and changing costumes, scripts, and stage directions from producers and directors.

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.

There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me," to alter the last phrase to "but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.

The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.

Psychological determinism asserts that every thought and feeling we have and every action we perform is caused by events in the past.

Futureoriented people believe that when you choose a behavior, you choose its future consequences, but Zajonc, Bargh, and many others in social psychology have demonstrated that sometimes you do not choose a behavior. Sometimes a behavior chooses you based upon the environment in which you find yourself.

Simple changes in tone and volume can cause temporal illusions that lead people to believe that more time has passed than really has.

Time even influenced postmodern artists such as Picasso, Braque, and Dalí. Picasso and Braque's cubist style, for instance, depicts people and objects as they exist from all perspectives simultaneously, while Salvador Dalí's Persistence of Memory depicts the malleability and relativity of time.

Years later, in 1987, I wrote a violin concerto for Ben. I knew he loved the Mendelssohn violin concerto, so I wrote it in a way that he would have liked. In his actual lifetime I didn't have the knowledge, skill, or inclination to compose such a work. I missed that chance by at least fifteen years. But when I could, I wrote it for him anyway.

IN A CLEAR WAY, WE ARE BOUND TO OUR CULTURE. We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see.