Quotes About Influence

The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives.

Let everything you do be done as if it makes a difference.

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny, invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man's pride.

Wherever you are, it is your friends who make your world.

Morality is the power of endurance in man; and a religion which teaches personal responsibility to God gives strength to morality. There is a powerful restraining influence in the belief that an all-seeing eye scrutinizes every thought and word and act of the individual.

My place in history will depend on what I can do for the people and not on what the people can do for me.

People who grow up without a sense of how yesterday has affected today are unlikely to have a strong sense of how today affects tomorrow. They are unlikely to understand in a bone-deep way how the decisions they make now will shape and affect their future.

It's quite uncanny what one sets in motion by being oneself.

that nobody's born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.

When she sang she could make people laugh or dance or fall in love or go to war.

I'm just saying, Odie, that nobody's born mean. Life warps you in terrible ways.

Standing in that simple cabin in the middle of nowhere, his hand in the grip of the oldest man he had ever seen, Bo realized that he was in the presence of someone whose power was of a remarkably different kind.

the Riverfront Times, and the books Making Friends Is Our Business, by Roland Krebs and Percy J. Orthwein; Under the Influence, by former Post-Dispatch reporters Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey; October 1964, by David Halberstam; and Dethroning the King, by former Financial Times reporter Julie MacIntosh. PROLOGUE: "AUGUST IS NOT FEELING WELL

The only outside power capable of persuading Israel to modify its policies and enter into negotiations was the United States. However, the United States would not exercise its influence in this matter until the PLO recognized the state of Israel, something it had steadfastly refused to do.

The men who rule have practiced keepin' their tongues still, not exercisin' them. So you want to drop the orator idea unless you mean to go into politics just to perform the skyrocket act.

The power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time immemorial been the magic power of the spoken word, and that alone. The broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.

When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,'" he said in a speech on November 6, 1933, "I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.

He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man's morals. No other party in Germany came near to attracting so many shady characters. As we have seen, a conglomeration of pimps, murderers, homosexuals, alcoholics and blackmailers flocked to the party as if to a natural haven. Hitler did not care, as long as they were useful to him.

That the possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility.

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment.

But it is hard to say no to my brother, whose invitations feel like commands. He says You wanna play golf? with the same presumption that a rich man says to his driver Will you bring the car around?

I have in mind an experiment. Take an infant—regardless of ancestry, race, talent, or predilection, so long as he is essentially healthy—and I will make of him whatever you like. I will produce an artist, soldier, doctor, lawyer, priest; or I will raise him to be a thief. You may decide. The infant is equally capable of all these things. All that is required is training, time, and a properly controlled environment." —JOHN F. WATKINS, Principles of Behaviorism (1913)

Anyway, the point is, I just think we flatter ourselves when we say we can engineer our kids to be this way or that way. It's mostly just hardwired.

choke him. They filled him with their trial and