Quotes About Influence

ANY UNCONTACTED BUYING INFLUENCE

For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.

How about the wrong crowd," I said. "You getting in with them?" "Not much luck," Paul said. "I'm trying like hell, but the wrong crowd doesn't seem to want me." "Don't quit," I said. "You want something, you go after it. I was nearly thirty-five before I could get in with wrong crowd.

At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government.

The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of others. On a large scale, power is the capacity to set the public agenda—to frame big choices, to influence legislators, and to get laws enacted or prevent them from being enacted, to assert one's will on the world.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for "less government" are really arguing for a different government—often one that favors them or their patrons.1

people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

I give money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that's how the system works," Trump said in 2016. Those might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

for small donors to participate, but large donors continue to dominate.) Even before the Supreme Court's grotesque 2010 decision

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin's thinking to America and twisted it into a theory to fit the times. Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner's writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

President Woodrow Wilson explained the dangerous connection between excessive economic and political power in similar terms, in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: "I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

Commitments to social responsibility are also conveniently reassuring to talented or privileged young people who want to do good while also doing well, and who don't want to acknowledge the cruel joke that, as Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has pointed out, people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

The idea of a "free market" separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They

My conclusion is that the only way to reverse course is for the vast majority who now lack influence over the rules of the game to become organized and unified

In my experience, nothing good happens in Washington unless good people outside Washington become mobilized, organized, and energized to make it happen. Nothing worth changing in America will actually change unless you and others like you are committed to achieving that change.

the sheer convenience of online political activism reduces its political potency.

The average American is unaware of this system—the patenting of drugs from nature, the renewal of patents based on insignificant changes, the aggressive marketing of prescription drugs, bans on purchases from foreign pharmacies, payments to doctors to prescribe specific drugs, and pay-for-delay—as well as the laws and administrative decisions that undergird all of it.

Republicans want us to believe that the central issue is the size of government, but the real issue is whom government is for.

How many billionaires and big corporations does it take to buy the presidency and Congress? We would soon find out—although we would not know many of their names.

In 2013, Apple spent $3,370,000 on lobbying; Amazon, $3,456,000; Facebook, $6,430,000; Microsoft, $10,490,000; and Google, $15,800,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The threat to America is not coming from peaceful demonstrators. And it's not coming from a government that's too large. It's coming from unprecedented amounts of money now inundating our democracy, mostly from big corporations and a handful of the super-rich.