Quotes About Influence

It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is pre-eminently a place of moral leadership.

Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move men, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic.

And I tell you this: you do not lead by hitting people over the head. Any damn fool can do that, but it's usually called 'assault'—not 'leadership.'…I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion—and conciliation—and education—and patience. It's long, slow, tough work. That's the only kind of leadership I know—or believe in—or will

Under Small's influence Jefferson came to share Immanuel Kant's 1784 definition of the spirit of the era: "Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity," Kant wrote.21 "Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another.

The delegates did provide that the president had to be a natural-born citizen, "or a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of this Constitution," suggesting that there has always been a wariness of foreign influence and of the foreign-born.)

Washington. In Monroe's Cabinet, Secretary of

The form of government which prevails," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "is the expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits it.

The Jefferson style – cultivate his elders, make himself pleasant to his contemporaries, and used his pen and his intellect to shape the debate – arm him well for the national arena.

The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get," Truman wrote.

Broadly put, philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

John Kennedy's death had changed everything. "Now I represent the whole country, and I can do what the whole country thinks is right," Johnson said. "Or ought to.

I knew that a President can appeal to the best in our people or the worst; he can call for action or live with inaction.

If Mrs. Roosevelt were writing today, she might put it this way: Don't let any single cable network or Twitter feed tell you what to think.

In 1940, fearing a third Roosevelt term, the Third Reich had sought to influence the presidential election by placing newspaper ads and paying for isolationist congressmen to attend the Republican National Convention.

political life in a position such as this is one long strain on the temper, one long acceptance of the second best, one long experiment of checking one's impulses with an iron hand and learning to subordinate one's own desires to what some hundreds of associates can be forced or cajoled or led into desiring.

They all live in cities, together, and can act in a body readily and at all times; they give chief employment to the newspapers, and therefore have most of them under their command. The agricultural interest is dispersed over a great extent of country, have little means of intercommunication with each other, and feeling their own strength and will, are conscious that a single exertion of these will at any time crush the machinations against their government. Jefferson

1802, Alexander Hamilton—himself an immigrant and, in the twenty-first century, an emblem of American mobility—had reservations: "The influx of foreigners must…tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities.

So much of music builds on prior ideas and themes

Joe began to get publicity-crazy," Smith recalled in an interview with the historian David M. Oshinsky. "And the other senators were now afraid to speak their minds, to take issue with him. It got to the point where some of us refused to be seen with people he disapproved of. A wave of fear had struck Washington.

Nothing makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency….The burden of his responsibility literally opens up his soul. No longer can he accept matters as given; no longer can he write off hopes and needs as impossible. —LYNDON B. JOHNSON

the habits of the governed determine in a great degree what is practicable.

fulcrum stood the brilliant but fallible

Thomas Jefferson was his father's son. He was raised to wield power. By example and perhaps explicitly he was taught that to be great—to be heeded—one had to grow comfortable with authority and with responsibility.

passed the fundamental test of leadership: Despite all his shortcomings and all the inevitable disappointments and mistakes and dreams deferred, he left America, and the world, in a better place than it had been when he first entered the arena of public life.