Quotes About Influence

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can't bother about where they're going.

Nature's full of things that aren't good or bad. They just are. Storms, sun, lightning, animals. There are a lot of forces that are neutral, but when they fall into certain hands they can become good or bad. It depends on how the user wants to use them. You can train a dog to be friendly or mean.

the present engenders the past far more energetically than the other way around.

The reason English-speaking readers can hardly tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is because they read neither prose. They're reading Constance Garnett.

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.

If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.

Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.

You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is.

We no longer desire and fear; we are what was desired and feared.

old Roman: "The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.

Of all the forms of m?y? that of woman is supreme.

The great tea masters were concerned to make of the divine wonder an experienced moment; then out of the teahouse the influence was carried into the home; and out of the home distilled into the nation. During the long and peaceful Tokugawa period (1603-1868), before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, the texture of Japanese life became so imbued with significant formalization that existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity, the landscape itself a shrine. p144

Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem.

And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of insuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such as will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world in which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one's heirs one's own paranoia. More

Absolute power corrupts, and power corrupts absolutely

the democratic idea' would not necessarily lead to the idea of 'the great protagonist' either; and further, that 'the great protagonists' in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.

An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense. Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.

It is not probable that the Hittite system of writing passed away without leaving its influence behind it ... There is reason to think that the curious syllabary which continued to be used in Cyprus as late as the age of Alexander the Great was derived from the Hittite hieroglyphs ... It is also possible that the names assigned to the letters even of the Phœnician alphabet were influenced by the hieroglyphs of the Hittites.

There was thus a Hittite population which clustered round Hebron, and to whom the origin of Jerusalem was partly due.

Ah, I think that nothing in the world vanishes utterly—nothing—not only what is said, but what is thought. All our deeds and words and thoughts are little streams, trickling springs underground.

Louisiana politics is of an intensity and complexity that are matched, in my experience, only in the republic of Lebanon.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.