Quotes About Impact

It is how we respond to loss that matters. That response will largely determine the quality, the direction, and the impact of our lives.

Booze has a different effect when you're, like, ten. Its doesn't round out the edges so much as wash you right out of the picture.

This is, I believe, what happens when people take their own lives. They're not killing themselves, they're killing the world. Either to spare it pain or to cause it some, depending.

Every communication has as its goal to take the audience from where they are at the start of your presentation, which is Point A, and move them to your objective, which is Point B. Recognizing

No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. —Mark Twain

To be candid with you, free agency hurts all sports. It's great for athletes making an enormous amount of money. But to say it helps the sports, I don't believe that.

Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one's actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement, as if only that which can be counted really counts.

Men in packs can do terrible things, things they wouldn't have the hate to do alone. It's no excuse, just something you should know.

Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.

A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.

I have done more harm by the falseness of trying to please than by the honesty of trying to hurt.

Can you imagine? That you can say something, offhand, and it can matter, it can really matter to someone else? Can you imagine what it's like to hear something like that? To hear someone say something and feel the world ripple around you?

You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.

In order to effect another person you must perform some action. Then you must be patient enough to wait for its effect. As you learn the signs of these effects, it may come to pass you do not need to wait as long. But as my wife often said, it can happen that you say or do a thing and the effect is felt years later perhaps in the reiteration of the scene in a dream. Who can say? Our actions echo.

Great things happen in small places. Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Jesse Jackson was born in Greenville.

The effect? A remarkably disproportionate number of black babies are aborted. The abortion rate per 1000 women for whites is 18, for blacks 54, and for others 38.46

Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants.

Are humans spiritual beings who transcend this planet? Or just fuck-ups trashing the earth?

To my mind the election was stolen by George Bush and we have been suffering ever since under this man's leadership.

Second is, don't try to change user behavior dramatically. If you are expecting people to dramatically change the way they do things, it's not going to happen. Try to make it such that it's a small change, yet an important one.

I think Angelina Jolie has done amazing, amazing things, and the international adoption rate just since her has skyrocketed. It's unbelievable.

Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? Why do scents or sounds trigger in some of us a feeling of terror or unbearable dread, even in situations where we know, at least, intellectually, that we are perfectly safe?

Ignoring men, whether romantically or rhetorically, is existential violence to them.

I simply don't think that putting every bit of energy I have into parenting-at the expense of my career, marriage and social life-will be the difference between Layla becoming homeless or the president. But too many women are made to believe that every tiny decision they make-from pacifiers to flash cards-will have a lasting impact on their child. It's a recipe for madness. It also reveals an overblown sense of self-importance.