Quotes About Influence

America is fated to lead. That is the judgment of geography as it has played out over the past two and a half centuries.

Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter's conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

What destroyed the Indian was not primarily political greed, land hunger, or military power, not the white man's germs or the white man's rum. What destroyed him was the manufactured products of a culture, iron and steel, guns, needles, woolen cloth, things that once possessed could not be done without."19

For it is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography.

Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.

state's position on the map is the first thing that defines it, more than its governing philosophy even.

As the Arab proverb says, "People resemble their times more than they resemble their fathers.

Geography, climate, population determine communications, economy, political organization.

keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin's admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title "Historical Inevitability," in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics.

Geography informs, rather than determines. Geography, therefore, is not synonymous with fatalism.

Kazakhstan is Mackinder's Heartland!

Take the architectural legacy of Bucharest: Byzantine, Brâncoveanu, Ottoman, Renaissance, Venetian Classical, French Baroque, Austrian Secession, Art Deco, and Modernist, all writhing and struggling to break free of a dirty gray sea of pillbox Stalinism, like Michelangelo's Unfinished Slaves struggling to break free of their marble blocks.

Rich kids are more confident that they can influence government, and they are largely right about that.14 Not surprisingly, poor kids are less likely to try.

politicians were prisoners of misguided

Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world's ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.

A strong man tied to a weak man… When there is trouble, the strong man's strength counts for nothing.

Well-liked… a dangerous quality in a leader.

Government isn't about religion or signs or symbols… It's about power and control.

You don't correct a president. You merely compliment them on their wisdom in seeking your counsel.

Lamentablemente, lo que se lleva en las relaciones es tener el control. Y cuando hay control, no hay amor. Durante siglos, hombres y mujeres en realidad no se han amado. Se han manipulado los unos a los otros. Cada sexo ha hecho sentir al otro que el amor debía ganárselo.

A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.