Quotes About Influence

The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the "court histories" that sprang up after the president's assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.

It is not sufficient for fathers to send their children to church, Sunday school, Christian camp, or private Christian school. You must read the Bible to your children yourself. Obviously, our children must see some correspondence between the Bible and our lives. But even as we work out our own Christian growth, we must read God's Word to and with our children.

Whenever a Christian layman, minister, writer, teacher, or whoever it might be, gets to thinking that there is something important about him, he or she will always cease to be effective as Christ's wit- ness."3 We

It is the male arm around the shoulder or pat on the back that God allows to have the quickest access to the heart of a child or employee. Men who are seeking to live out the Masculine Mandate will be nurturers.

Rock & roll music is a derivative of rockabilly music; rockabilly music is Bill Monroe and the blues tied together. That's it.

The bitter irony, of course, was that the same young musicians who stood in awe of Bill Monroe were about to push him, and others like him, off the stage. Rock 'n' roll began to take the youth audience away from country music. And that was a disaster.

The most striking hallmarks of so-called traditional bluegrass were fully defined during the Jimmy Martin years, long after Flatt and Scruggs had left the Blue Grass Boys. If Bill Monroe started bluegrass, Earl Scruggs certainly made it as popular as it is today. But it is crucial to recognize that Monroe was the prime creative organizer and artistic guiding force behind bluegrass.

the market has been anthropomorphized. It is not created by us but creates us. That's what the market distates. If Jesus can talk to you, the market can talk to you.

I'm not one of those who wants to purge our society of our Christian history.

Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.

If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a teacher, a history teacher. After all, teaching is very much like performing. A teacher is an actor, in a way. It takes a great deal to get, and hold, a class.

Power I defined as personal influence of an effective sort on governmental action.

Whether you're heroic or heartless may depend on a contextual factor whose impact is far greater than we would tend to assume.

A place makes a deep impression on you when you're young. It lives with you. It's like your childhood. It fertilises the imagination.

Museums have no political power, but they do have the possibility of influencing the political process. This is a complete change from their role in the early days of collecting and hoarding the world to one of using the collections as an archive for a changing world. This role is not merely scientifically important, but it is also a cultural necessity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson could write (in The Conduct of Life, 1860): 'The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.' Mountains

People come to Washington believing it's the center of power. I know I did. It was only much later that I learned that Washington is a steering wheel that's not connected to the engine.

We resurrected our history in order to sell tickets and make money from it, but it's more powerful than we are. It's like we resurrected a monster and now we can't control it. Sometimes it feels like progress is impossible, because the dead are running the show.

work. He has encouraged and backed me up for nearly twenty years now, although we have never met. But it seems to make no difference. I consider Graham Greene not only the finest writer, but the finest and most perfect friend a man can have in this world.'16 For his part, Greene thought Narayan a worthy candidate for the Nobel Prize,17 and in 1974 wrote: 'Since the death of Evelyn Waugh Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.'18

You could pick your friends, but not your Presidents.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

We are also greatly influenced by consumption norms within the relevant group. A light eater eats much more in a group of heavy eaters. A heavy eater will show more restraint in a light-eating group. The group average thus exerts a significant influence. But there are gender differences as well. Women often eat less on dates; men tend to eat a lot more, apparently with the belief that women are impressed by a lot of manly eating. (Note to men: they aren't.) So

a nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of Humans

First, never underestimate the power of inertia. Second, that power can be harnessed. If private companies or public officials think that one policy produces better outcomes, they can greatly influence the outcome by choosing it as the default.