Quotes About Influence

My parents shaped my character and therefore my life.

The pencil is mightier than the pen.

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.

to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for their own sake, thus making an art out of what he is doing, he's likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves.

as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible.

Words have power. They can save, cure, uplift, devastate, deflate, and kill. And unconscious priming with words influences pro- and antisocial behaviors.

There's also subliminal cuing about beauty.18 From an early age, in both sexes and across cultures, attractive people are judged to be smarter, kinder, and more honest. We're more likely to vote for attractive people or hire them, less likely to convict them of crimes, and, if they are convicted, more likely to dole out shorter sentences.

One study showed kids, ages five to thirteen, pairs of faces of candidates from obscure elections and asked them whom they'd prefer as captain on a hypothetical boat trip. And kids picked the winner 71 percent of the time.31

She was lionized, canonized, Nobel Prized (and was wonderfully inspirational, as disinterested in acclaim as in her ostracism, working until her nineties).

If people around you smell scared, your brain tilts toward concluding that you are too.

Thus, particularly important is a 2011 study that used transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques to temporarily inactivate the vmPFC; subjects became less likely to change their answer to conform.

Our prototypical behavior has occurred. How was it influenced by events when the egg and sperm that formed that person joined, creating their genome—the chromosomes, the sequences of DNA—destined to be duplicated in every cell in that future person's body? What role did those genes play in causing that behavior?

What's a heritability score? "What does a gene do?" is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that trait?

Most child behavioral development research is implicitly stage oriented, concerning: (a) the sequence with which stages emerge; (b) how experience influences the speed and surety with which that sequential tape of maturation unreels; and (c) how this helps create the adult a child ultimately becomes.

Thus, over the course of seconds sensory cues can shape your behavior unconsciously.

This context dependency means that rather than causing X, testosterone amplifies the power of something else to cause X.

A high status male will make strong, powerful eye contact when he's talking to a girl, but he will make less eye contact when she's talking to him. This will make her work harder to gain his attention and win his approval. That's called the 90/60 Rule.

They're in control of the situation; -They're in control of themselves (men); and -They're in control of them (women).

And so the mind or spirit is the great opportunist, itself impossible to pin down, take hold of, anywhere; one is tempted to believe that of all its influence nothing is left but decay. Every advance is a gain in particular and a separation in general; it is an increase in power leading only to a progressive increase in impotence, but there is no way to quit.

If all the artists you loved changed you, they'd hack you up in little piece and you'd never get back together. That, or you'd end up loving only one artist forever.

If you want him to do it, you've got to change the picture of the world inside his head.

What you are is an expression of history.

It is virtually impossible to understand how biology works outside the context of environment.

It's complicated...Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns... We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don't know a thing about.