Quotes About Impact

As a wise man once said, 'If not us, then who; if not now, then when?'

Every day I've got to get up and make a decision. I have an opportunity every day to affect young men and the coaches that are around me, the entire organization and the entire community.

Enjoyment inflames love in some men, and extinguishes it in others: the wind that assists large vessels, upsets small ones.

The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said

Words must surely be counted among the most powerful drugs man ever invented.

A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

It seems to me like stealing, for men and women to live in the world and do nothing to make it better.

How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man.

Whereas ordinary officers must be content with behaving correctly in front of their men, the great leaders have always carefully stage-managed their effects.

Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted.

The ordinary man is involved in action, the hero acts. An immense difference.

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.

As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.

But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost—swallowed up in the ocean—unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.

They went inside. The young ones shuffled to a stop as their ironic sensibilities, which served them in lieu of souls, were jammed by a signal of overwhelming power.

The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished, sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.

Richard's ex-girlfriends were long gone, but their voices followed him all the time and spoke to him, like Muses or Furies. It was like having seven superegos arranged in a firing squad before a single beleaguered id, making sure he didn't enjoy that last cigarette.

There is a certain kind of small town that grows like a boil on the ass of every Army base in the world.

It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.

For members of the general public might not care about Wolf-Rayet stars in the Quintuplet Cluster, but they definitely saw why having hot rocks fall on one's head was a good thing to avoid.

One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world's adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.

I was in Mexico a couple of weeks ago," Avi says. "They have plastic forests there!" "What does that mean?" "Downwind of the city, the trees sort of comb the plastic shopping bags out of the air. They get totally covered with them. The trees die because light and air can't get through to the leaves. But they remain standing, totally encased in fluttering, ragged plastic, all different colors.

The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get older, is that there are a few billion other people in the world all trying to be clever at the same time, and whatever you do with your life will certainly be lost—swallowed up in the ocean—unless you are doing it along with like-minded people who will remember your contributions and carry them forward.