Selected influence quotes

1. Before Elvis there was nothing.

2. For I must write to The Times tonight, and save the world from sin.

3. You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

4. You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

5. The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

6. Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.

7. One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

8. It's the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it, how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel about it.

9. Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

10. I have made more friends for American culture than the State Department. Certainly I have made fewer enemies, but that isn't very difficult.

11. My life has been greatly influenced by many books which I have never read.

12. Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

13. Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact.

14. It was only when I realized how actors have the power to move people that I decided to pursue acting as a career.

15. Experience has shown that the trade of the East is the key to national wealth and influence.

16. The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.

17. You have no idea what a long-legged gal can do without doing anything.

18. We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

19. Bad company is as instructive as licentiousness. One makes up for the loss of one's innocence with the loss of one's prejudices.

20. In order to influence a child, one must be careful not to be that child's parent or grandparent.

21. Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.

22. I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

23. Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind.

24. For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.

25. The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

26. Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.

27. I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women... no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.

28. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain was the incubus of Europe. Gloomy and portentous, she chilled the world with her baneful shadow.

29. Let the famous not denounce fame. Far from being empty and meaningless, it fills those it touches with divine power.

30. Jimi Hendrix is very important. He's my idol. He sort of epitomizes, from his presentation on stage, the whole works of a rock star. There's no way you can compare him. You either have the magic or you don't. There's no way you can work up to it. There's nobody who can take his place.

31. My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

32. My meetings with [Ahmed Chalabi] were very brief. I mean, I think I met with him at the State of the Union and just kind of working through the rope line, and he might have come with a group of leaders. But I haven't had any extensive conversations with him.

33. Example, whether it be good or bad, has a powerful influence.

34. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

35. Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions.

36. Our power is not so much in us as through us.

37. There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

38. A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

39. The real leader has no need to lead - he is content to point the way.

40. A charming fellow, and so clever: he models himself on me.

41. It's rare when an artist's talent can touch an entire generation of people. It's even rarer when that same influence affects several generations. Elvis made an imprint on the world of pop music unequaled by any other single performer.

42. I learned music listening to Elvis' records. His measurable effect on culture and music was even greater in England than in the States.

43. Elvis was a giant and influenced everyone in the business.

44. Ask anyone. If it hadn't been for Elvis, I don't know where popular music would be. He was the one that started it all off, and he was definitely the start of it for me.

45. Elvis was the king. No doubt about it. People like myself, Mick Jagger and all the others only followed in his footsteps.

46. Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!

47. One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small, And the ones that mother gives you don't do anything at all. Go ask Alice when she's ten feet tall.

48. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.

49. The world is rid of Lord Byron, but the deadly slime of his touch still remains.

50. If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.

51. 'The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.'

52. Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

53. Wherever you are it is your own friends who make your world.

54. He was the first writer I fell in love with, boyishly in love. I was held by his unaffected voice, his sentimentality, his defiant individualism. I found myself in the stories he told... I learned from Saroyan that you do not have to live in some great city - in New York or Paris - in order to write... When I was a student at Stanford, a generation ago, the name of William Saroyan was never mentioned by any professor in the English Department. William Saroyan apparently was not considered a major American talent. Instead, we undergraduates set about the business of psychoanalyzing Hamlet and deconstructing Lolita. In my mind Saroyan belongs with John Steinbeck, a fellow small town Californian and of the same generation. He belongs with Thornton Wilder, with those writers whose aching love of America was formed by the Depression and the shadow of war. ... Saroyan's prose is as plain as it is strong. He talks about the pleasure of drinking water from a hose on a summer afternoon in California's Central Valley, and he holds you with the pure line. My favorite is his novel The Human Comedy... In 1943, The Human Comedy became an MGM movie starring Mickey Rooney, but I always imagined Homer Macaulay as a darker, more soulful boy, someone who looked very much like a young William Saroyan...

55. Every woman is infallibly to be gained by every sort of flattery, and every man by one sort or other.

56. 'We really can't change the world. We really can't change other people! The best we can do is to start a few thinking here and there. The best way to do this, if we are sincere, is to change ourselves!'

57. The first time I saw Peter what made the impression was the visual content of what he and Dudley Moore were doing. It was Not Only, But Also..., and Pete and Dud were dressed up as nuns and were bouncing up and down on a trampoline. I rolled off my seat. I thought I'd ever seen anything so hilarious or so surreal or so... well... beautiful. I spent the next four or five years trying to emulate that sort of visual surprise. ~ Terry Jones

58. If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

59. Our so-called Society people, instead of going in for sport, persist in holding conversations in their drawing rooms, generally in a foreign tongue. They engage nurse maids, personal maids and governesses of all nationalities except Italian. They play poker and bridge with the accompanying drinks, certainly not Italian brands!

60. He had that quality for which the Africans, who know how to appreciate it, have found a special term. 'Nommo' is the Bantu word for the gift of making life rather larger and more vivid for everyone else.

61. There are men who could neither be distressed nor won into a sacrifice of their duty; but this stern virtue is the growth of few soils; and in the main it will be found that a power over a man's support is a power over his will. If it were necessary to confirm so plain a truth by facts, examples would not be wanting, even in this country, of the intimidation or seduction of the Executive by the terrors or allurements of the pecuniary arrangements of the legislative body.

62. Hamilton is really a colossus... without numbers, he is a host unto himself.

63. Hamilton was the greatest constructive mind in all our history and I should come pretty near saying... in the history of modern statesmen in any country.

64. In towns it is impossible to prevent men from assembling, getting excited together and forming sudden passionate resolves. Towns are like great meeting houses with all the inhabitants as members. In them the people wield immense influence over their magistrates and often carry their desires into execution without intermediaries.

65. CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

66. When I met Jorge Luis Borges some time ago and remarked that I was about to embark on writing a book about Schopenhauer, he became excited and started talked volubly about how much Schopenhauer had meant to him. It was the desire to read Schopenhauer in the original, he said, that had made him learn German; and when people asked him, which they often had, why he with his love of intricate structure had never attempted a systematic exposition of the world-view which underlay his writings, his reply was that he did not do it because it had already been done by Schopenhauer.'

67. Kluge Sanftmut ist des Weibes unwiderstehlichste Waffe.

68. All of us encounter, at least once in our life, some individual who utters words that make us think forever. There are men whose phrases are oracles; who condense in one sentence the secrets of life; who blurt out an aphorism that forms a character or illustrates an existence.

69. A majority is always the best repartee.

70. Had it not been for you, I should have remained what I was when we first met, a prejudiced, narrow-minded being, with contracted sympathies and false knowledge, wasting my life on obsolete trifles, and utterly insensible to the privilege of living in this wondrous age of change and progress.

71. The more you are talked about the less powerful you are.

72. A very remarkable people the Zulus: they defeat our generals, they convert our bishops, they have settled the fate of a great European dynasties.

73. The press is not only free, it is powerful. That power is ours. It is the proudest that man can enjoy.

74. You have heard me accused me of being a flatterer. It is true. I am a flatterer. I have found it useful. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.

75. They that touch pitch will be defiled.

76. He was quite remarkable enough to fill a volume of Eloge. Someone wrote to me yesterday that no Jew for 1800 years has played so great a part in the world. That would be no Jew since St. Paul; and it is very startling.

77. Humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider. . . . Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omni-system-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny.

78. It is not for me to change you. The question is, how can I be of service to you without diminishing your degrees of freedom?

79. My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.

80. She was the unsung hero who was quite willing to stand back and pull the strings - and though everyone thinks someone else had done it. It was like the Wizard of Oz you know... she's back there behind the curtains: 'Ignore that woman behind the curtain'...

81. From time to time, you will hear our opponents declare that the union is weak, that the union has no support, that the union has not grown fast enough. Our obituary has been written many times. How ironic it is that the same forces that argue so passionately that the union is not influential are the same forces that continue to fight us so hard.

82. Charm is the true gift of the Fairies.

83. You have to wait for people to program you. The only difference is the amount of people that you're going to reach but that's going to even out in the next two or three years anyway. Computers are being bought faster than televisions right now.

84. 'Lying under this spell you cast on me/ Each moment/ The more I love you'

85. You have mosquitos. I have the Press.

86. Bugsby's reach is long as time, His reach is wide as wind is, He can pick you nettles in Greenwich Marsh And docks in the East Indies.

87. Some people talk about me like a revolutionary. That's nonsense; all I did was copy B.B. King.

88. I think Clapton is brilliant. He's the only one who moved me. The only one who made me want to play the guitar.

89. Action men are the unvoluntary slaves of wise men.

90. On donne des conseils mais on n'inspire point de conduite.

91. Il faut ecouter ceux qui parlent, si on veut en etre ecoute.

92. But Hitler didn't strive for the annihilation of the Jews - he stressed that fact in public life and in the newspapers. Hitler merely said at the beginning that Jewish influence was too great, that of all the lawyers in Berlin, eighty percent were Jewish. Hitler thought that a small percentage of the people, the Jews, should not be allowed to control the theater, cinema, radio, et cetera.

93. Himmler hated the church. He and Bormann were the two people who influenced Hitler most. When I spoke to Hitler in the beginning he agreed with me and said that no state could be governed without religion. In Mein Kampf he said that a man was a fool if he destroyed the religion of the people. Hitler also made the statement that the political reform should not be a religious reform.

94. If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

95. Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.

96. The future influences the present just as much as the past.

97. Modern European composers:have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.

98. The thing that pleases me the most about it is that young people like it. It's given kids from 6 to 16 an alternate view of music to what's been available for the past 20 years.

99. That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event.

100. You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.