Quotes About Influence

Vanity is both a great motivator and a great deceiver, and the idea of leaving behind an everlasting legacy can spur even the most cautious person to proceed recklessly.

I will not permit thirty men to travel four hundred miles to agitate a bag of wind.

I spent many years trying to write a lot like Ben Folds or John Lennon or Rivers Cuomo. I think that's healthy when you're learning to write and seeing how chords fit together and how songs take shape.

Forgoing outright atrocity, of which there is so much—too much—right now, aren't the 'life,''body,' and 'face' of Michael Jackson in the running for some of the most abstract events of the last century?

Most subjects want to shape your view of them, of course.

As the Cold War extended and British influence diminished, so the Americans moved into traditional British areas in response to Soviet threats and the Soviet Union's growing arms industry. By the early sixties, the United States was by far the biggest exporter of arms, forcing Britain to compete more desperately for her markets abroad.

The arms industry and its powerful political friends have forged a parallel political universe that largely insulates itself against the influence or judgement of others by invoking national security. This is the shadow world.

If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

As compelling as it may be to try and convince our friends to stop investing in that 'bubble' real estate market, or get your parents to move overseas with you, they have to make the decision on their own.

Influenced by Wesley and the revival movement, Englishman William Wilberforce led the successful movement to abolish slavery throughout the British Empire.

By contrast, Rice said, "Negro ministers, unfortunately have...very often had a bad influence. The Negro minister [Martin Luther King Jr.] in Montgomery, Alabama, who led in the organization of a Negro boycott of the buses, led that fight, unfortunately, not as a Christian trying to make good Christians and to lead in Christian understanding between the races. He led that boycott as a modernist and a socialist who was more concerned about racism than he was about Christianity, I fear.

And it was Texas that turned out to be especially congenial to the development of Christian fundamentalism in America.

First, if Rice had preached to his all-white Texas audience in 1930 against racial injustice or oppression he would have been castigated as a modernist, a radical socialist, or a social gospel do-gooder, and lost all his influence in the fundamentalist movement, most or all of his friends, and maybe even his life.

The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any unproved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result.

Only influence there—prior to any actual decision to intervene—could prevent feckless civilians from committing the nation to wars or quasi-wars not to the military's own liking. In

The resulting fractious, at times even dysfunctional, relationship between the top brass and civilian political leaders is one of Washington's dirty little secrets—recognized by all of the inside players, concealed from an electorate that might ask discomfiting questions about who is actually in charge.

The self-assigned role of elite institutions in presidential politics is not to decide who will win, but to assess eligibility to compete.

Of course, some captains are more adept at doing so than others. A successful president correctly discerns what existing conditions require and creates the impression that he is the master of circumstance rather than its servant. James Polk, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley offer illustrative examples.

One cannot understand a political "system" detached from its societal context

It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their own selfish purposes.

Money is power, and in that government which pays all the public officers of the states will all political power be substantially concentrated.

My dad traveled a lot, so I only usually saw him on weekends, growing up. His favorite actors in the world were Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds. If Clint or Burt had a movie out, we would go to the movies. He didn't like movies, generally, unless Clint or Burt were in them.

I don't ever remember wanting to do anything but coach. My dad obviously influenced me. But it wasn't because he sat there and drilled coaching stuff into our heads. We were on the bench keeping the scorebook and traveling with the team on weekends. It was such a great upbringing.

My mum used to paint and my dad did woodturning. We would spend our weekends at craft fairs and art galleries. That was just what we did. We were steeped in that world.