Quotes About Impact

If I am ever to be remembered," Johnson wistfully told me, "it will be for civil rights.

So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.

The majority of the great fortunes were "won not by doing evil, but as an incident to action which has benefited the community as a whole.

Don't hit unless you have to, but when you hit, hit hard.

If he (Teddy Roosevelt) lacked Will Taft's immediate charisma, gradually his classmates could not resist the spell of his highly original personality.

Assume full responsibility for a pivotal decision.

Assemblyman Isaac Hunt, who later became a close friend, would never forget the first time he saw Roosevelt. "He came in as if he had been ejected by a catapult," Hunt recalled.

How children dance," Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "to the unlived lives of their parents

A five minute speech," he pointed out, "with fifteen minutes spent afterward is much more effective than a fifteen minute speech, no matter how inspiring, that leaves only five minutes for handshaking.

I made the discovery long ago that very few people made a great difference to me, but that those few mattered enormously. I live surrounded by people, and my thoughts are always with the few that matter whether they are near or far.

We have become desensitized. Watching, night after night, day after day, year after year, the horrors going on all over the world have desensitized us exactly as those soldiers have been deliberately brutalized. No one set out to brutalize us, to make us callous; but that is what we increasingly are.

Ich glaube, dass Literatur – ein Roman, eine Erzählung, sogar eine Zeile aus einem Gedicht – die Macht hat, Reiche zu zerstören. (Schritte im Schatten)

stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.

I wanted the way I felt to mean something and for everything in my life to change because of it.

If it's true, I have the absolute right to terrify you with it.

Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.

He can make you want to knock him down, if he feels like it, by simply saying "good morning". He possibly said simply "good morning" to Lord Culter. The difference was that, being his brother, Culter hit him.

Lymond's life was lived on this level: the level on which the future of whole communities could be steered or reshaped, improved or jeopardized by a handful of people.

I find your family, my dear Marthe, much more disturbing than mine.

Now she was wiser. In this brief and dizzying apprenticeship, she had started to realize that, whatever his occupation, Lymond's life was lived on this level: the level on which the future of whole communities could be steered or reshaped, improved or jeopardized by a handful of people.

She told me one night that she had no wish to go on living, and that if she did, it could only harm you. She was thirteen years old.… Can you not stand still, and look me in the face, and give me an answer?

Words is but wind but dunts is the devil

Men throughout Scotland and over the narrow seas who lived different lives because they had known him. To carry his bright legacy into the future, he did not require to have children. No one, once they had met him, could remain the same.

I don't need to strike you. Words will do just as well.