Quotes About Influence

You know what charm is a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

Never regard study as a duty but as an enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later works belong.

I have reached the conviction that the abolition of the death penalty is desirable. Reasons: 1) Irreparability in the event of an error of justice, 2) Detrimental moral influence of the execution procedure on those who, whether directly or indirectly, have to do with the procedure.

When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

You can't blame gravity for falling in love.

Mathematics are well and good but nature keeps dragging us around by the nose.

Love is a better teacher than duty.

Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful and then only for a short while.

The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Common sense is that layer of prejudices which we acquire before we are sixteen.

Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for insects as well as for the stars. Human beings, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value.

Nothing in the world makes people so afraid as the influence of independent-minded people.

Useless knowledge can be made directly contributory to a force of sound and disinterested public opinion.

In the last generation, this country produced one of the most eminent men of science in the whole world. His name was quite unknown among us while he lived, and it is still unknown. Yet I may say without too great exaggeration that when I heard it mentioned in a professional assembly in the Netherlands two years ago, everybody got down under the table and touched their foreheads to the floor. His name was Josiah Willard Gibbs .

It is unfortunately none to well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another. There is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.

the "allies" of today would be the bureaucrats of tomorrow ...

To be sure, the church has greatly assisted the colonialist; backing his ventures, helping his conscience, contributing to the acceptance of colonization even by the colonized.