Quotes About Influence

Siraj's most serious error was to alienate the great bankers of Bengal, the Jagat Seths. The Seths' machinations had brought Aliverdi to power, and anyone who wanted to operate in the region did well to cultivate their favour; but Siraj did the opposite to the two men of the family

the Afghans, were to a man executed on Durrani's orders. The Peshwa Ballaji Rao died broken-hearted soon after: 'his mind had become confused and he began to revile and curse his people'.95 But a decade later, Durrani was dead and the Marathas had begun to recover their strength. They were now back in control of much of central and western India, and ambitious to extend their influence from the Kaveri to the Indus.

as Edmund Burke famously put it, 'a state in the guise of a merchant'.

But the ifs of history: if Cleopatra's nose had been one inch longer,' he said, 'would Antony have lost the battle of Actium?

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.

The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company's control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west.

What honour is left to us?' asked a Mughal official, 'when we have to take orders from a handful of traders who have not yet learned to wash their bottoms?

Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Turgenev; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful.

A recent study shows that one hundred per cent of youngsters on hard drugs had at some time in their lives listened to so-called pop music

The corporation has evolved to serve the interests of whoever controls it, at the expense of whoever does not.

Any factor that breeds polarization will worsen policy, and thus cause lower growth.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

The world is governed by opinion.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aidthem to judge for themselves.

Decent people should ignore politics, if only they could be confident that politics would ignore them

I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

Cupid, you see, was a more dangerous archer than even mighty Apollo, for, although Apollo's arrows could drain one's life blood in an instant, a wound from Cupid's arrows would cause one to fall deeply in love

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

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

Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

For no other reason than that he was a devotee of Faulkner, he sent it to Random House first.