631 Influence Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

'In the collective memory of his fans, he reigns as the sleek musical genius who soaked up the multiple influences of America's vernacular music -gospel, country swing, rhythm 'n' blues-, and made them his own; Bob Dylan, one of pop's favorite poets, put it best: Elvis, he said, was 'the incendiary atomic musical firebrand loner who conquered the western world.'

'When at last I made my journey to the land of the blues, I never dreamt for one minute that I'd actually become friends with the guys who were my mentors, heroes and my cultural icons. (Witherspoon's) voice held a great mysticism for me, like when I first heard the voice of Elvis Presley-you knew it was coming from the source'

'Elvis was one of the prime architects of rock and roll music. As such, he influenced several generations both musically and socially. The urgency in Presley's voice is just one part of the equation, and the ease with which he swings tells the rest of the story. Equal parts balladeer and rockabilly king, Elvis played both sides of the fence. He was both tender-love-man and hard-hitting rebel. As this collection proves, his genius was in the way he made it work'

Till then these sound opinions have taken firm root in you, and you have gained a measure of strength for your security, I counsel you to be cautious in associating with the uninstructed. Else whatever impressions you receive upon the tablets of your mind in the School will day by day melt and disappear, like wax in the sun. Withdraw then somewhere far from the sun, while you have these waxen sentiments. (107)

That man is an Euclidian point: position without substance.

Yes. Especially during the last phase of the war. Kaltenbrunner had more influence with Hitler - in practice, Kaltenbrunner was worse than Himmler.

The way in which I depict people was now influenced very strongly by my third wife..and her sister.The beautiful,shapely architectonically structured bodies of those two girls,replaced the soft Saxon bodies.

His remains the finest palette in France and nobody in our country has possessed at once such calm and pathos, such shimmering color. We all paint in him.

He was one of those men who comes in a door and make any woman with them look guilty.

Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est.

His place in history is secure. His continuing influence is assured. This country's architectural achievements would be unthinkable without him. He has been a teacher to us all.

He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times... you see a little bit of Astaire in everybody's dancing--a pause here, a move there. It was all Astaire originally.

When I was in the Soviet Union recently I was being interviewed by a newspaperman and he said, 'Which dancers influenced you the most?' and I said, 'Oh, well, Fred Astaire.' He looked very surprised and shocked and I said, 'What's the matter?' He said, 'Well, Mr. Balanchine just said the same thing.'

If I didn't have Freddie Mercury's lyrics to hold on to as a kid, I don't know where I would be. It taught me about all forms of music. It would open my mind. I never really had a bigger teacher in my whole life.

The Nobel Prize confers on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to possess. This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to seize if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally. There is no reason why a man who has made a distinctive contribution to economic science should be omnicompetent on all problems of society - as the press tends to treat him till in the end he may himself be persuaded to believe.

The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.

We do not think good metaphors are anything very important, but I think that a good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on...

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

The intercourse with reasonable people is advisable to everybody because, in this way, a blockhead can become wise by imitation, for the greatest blockheads can imitate, even apes and elephants can do it.

We live in a world in which one fool makes many fools but one wise man only a few wise men.

I never read a reply by Shaw that did not leave me in better and not worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fairmindedness and intellectual geniality; which did not savor somehow of that native largeness which the philosophers attributed to Magnanimous Man.

Cannon his name, Cannon his voice, he came.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because 'friends react on one another' and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true.

I have earned capitol, and I intend to spend it.

Defending our nation is just the beginning of our challenge. My third goal is to take advantage of a tremendous opportunity - given few nations in history - to extend the current peace into the far realm of the future. A chance to project America's peaceful influence, not just across the world, but across the years.

Let me put it to you this way. I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.

It was I who gave the title 'J'accuse' to Zola's letter.

Gerry Durrell was, to use the modern idiom, Magic. You imbibe it in his books, you feel it in his Zoo, you see it in the eyes of his trainees, and you hear it in even the most restrained tones of zoo directors, who may command budgets ten times the size that he ever did.

Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolaliac incantations, her half-witted-sounding catalogues on numbers; most of us read her less and less. Yet, remembering especially her early work, we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature- and we picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the process of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological country like some august human seismograph whose charts we haven't the training to read.

Joyce gives the ghost guises like Saint Bruno and The Nolan of the Cabashes and Noland's brown and Nolan Browne and Bruno Nowlan and Nolans Brumans and Mr. Brown and Bruno Nolan and many others. The encyclopedic Joyce was deeply impressed by Bruno's heady coincidence of contraries, and was no doubt sympathetic to Bruno's hectic and finally tragic bouts with the Inquisition. McLuhan the Joycean scholar was certainly conscious of Joyce's debt to Bruno. But I like to think there was more: that when 'Bruno Nolan' winked from one of paper sleeves, McLuhan made a recognition as if glimpsing a companion from across the centuries and winked back.

We wanted to show the influence Cuban music has had on musicians from all over, so we invited 25 of the top Latin musicians in the world, and it was a great honor they paid me. Some of them are actually inventors, like Cachao, the Cuban bassist creditied with creating mambo.

[I] grew up in this city [Miami], and my music is a blend of two cultures. In the beginning it was heavily Cuban. At this point it's [from] all over . . .

There are singers who can captivate a community. There are vocalists whose sound can penetrate deeply into your soul. There are entertainers who can mesmerize, enlighten and entertain, all in one breath. [And there is] Gloria Estefan -- who does it all, effortlessly.

Anais Nin gave me my most original, or so I thought, creation. As I read Incest, I realized that something which I had always taken to be unique, the voice of Myra Breckinridge, was actually that of Anais in all the flowing megalomania of the diaries. Of course, I had not read the diaries then, but even so, if only for that one thundering voice, I am forever in her debt.

My child arrived just the other day, He came to the world in the usual way. But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away. And he was talking 'fore I knew it, and as he grew, He'd say, 'I'm gonna be like you, dad. You know I'm gonna be like you.'

Hollywood can't believe that anyone does anything without an eye on the public, as if every actor wants to read about himself in the papers. It's depressing to think that such an artificial and unbalanced community exerts so much influence on our country.

In modern art, it is undoubtedly to Cezanne that I owe the most.

She was to me, and still is, the greatest person I have known - one who can truly be called a 'devoted' soul. I owe her everything.

The imaginative artist willy-nilly influences his time. If he understands his responsibility and acts on it-taking the art seriously always, himself never quite-he can make a contribution equal to, if different from, that of the scientist, the politician, and the jurist. The anarchic artist so much in vogue now-asserting with vehemence and violence that he writes only for himself, grubbing in the worst seams of life-can do damage. But he can also be so useful in breaking up obsolete molds, exposing shams, and crying out the truth, that the broadest freedom of art seems to me necessary to a country worth living in.

Pierre l'Ermite, Calvin et Robespierre, chacun a trois cents ans de distance, ces trois Picards ont ete, politiquement parlant, des leviers d'Archimede. C'etait a chaque epoque une pensee qui recontrait un point d'appel dans les interets et chez les hommes.

You know, in all honesty, we all have our favorite forms. I would have to say, as a young person tasting material, O. Henry, with all those weird, paradoxical twists, really hung me up. The world's full of ideas.

If you design your own machine, you can't fuss at people, because you're one of just a few. How many Linux users are there?

There are two types of women: those who want power in the world, and those who want power in the bedroom.

When one begins looking for influences one finds them by the score. I haven't thought much about my own, not enough anyway; I hazard that the King James Bible, the rhetoric of the store-front church, something ironic and violent and perpetually understated in Negro speech - and something of Dickens' love for bravura - have something to do with me today; but I wouldn't stake my life on it. Likewise, innumerable people have helped me in many ways; but finally, I suppose, the most difficult (and most rewarding) thing in my life has been the fact that I was born a Negro and was forced, therefore, to effect some kind of truce with this reality. (Truce, by the way, is the best one can hope for.)

The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.

Johnson is dead. Let us go to the next best:-there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.

Sometimes an ill favored bitch gnaws a good chord.

From the time I was a baby, this [Jazz] was the music I liked.

I've always had a very strong interest in Asian culture, It always struck a deep chord in me, and some of my favorite films are Kurosawa's 'Kagemusha' and 'Ran,' and Bertolucci's 'The Last Emperor.' And I thought that the passion of the people, the history and the culture would be a really strong foundation for the song ['From Yesterday'].

Think of us as erotic politicians.

I don't, however, see anything wrong with Christians, Muslims, and Jews exhibiting their own faith in the political arena. Christ tried to change the society within which he lived. He didn't hold public office and wouldn't have. But you don't have to hold public office to try to change the basic policies of a country.

It is due to him that the Roman concepts of public duty and service are still a living force among us. Historians have denied him the name of genius which they grant readily to Alexander and Julius and Napoleon; but if it be not genius to re-make and re-direct the world by a courageous realism and supreme powers of character and mind, then the word has no meaning in human speech.

Art is the great and universal refreshment. For Art is never dogmatic; holds no brief for itself; you may take it, or you may leave it. It does not force itself rudely where it is not wanted. It is reverent to all tempers, to all points of view. But it is wilful - the very wind in the comings and goings of its influence, an uncapturable fugitive, visiting our hearts at vagrant, sweet moments; since we often stand even before the greatest works of Art without being able quite to lose ourselves! That restful oblivion comes, we never quite know when - and it is gone! But when it comes, it is a spirit hovering with cool wings, blessing us from least to greatest, according to our powers; a spirit deathless and varied as human life itself.

Off oure language he was the lodesterre.

For hit ys oft seyde by hem that yet lyues He must nedys go that the deuell dryues.

John Muir talked even better than he wrote. His greatest influence was always upon those who were brought into personal contact with him. But he wrote well, and while his books have not the peculiar charm that a very, very few other writers on similar subjects have had, they will nevertheless last long. Our generation owes much to John Muir.

No man was more influential than John Muir in preserving the Sierra's integrity. If I were to choose a single Californian to occupy the Hall of Fame, it would be this tenacious Scot who became a Californian during the final forty-six years of his life. It was John Muir whose knowledge wedded to zeal led men and governments to establish the National Park Service. Yosemite and Sequoia in California, the Petrified forest and the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the glacier wilderness of Alaska are what they are today largely because of this one man, in whom learning and love were co-equal. More than any other, he was the answer to that call which appears on the Courts Building in Sacramento: Give me men to match my mountains.

If you think about all the gains our society has made, from independence to now, it wasn't government. It was activism. People think, 'Oh, Teddy Roosevelt established Yosemite National Park, what a great president.' BS. It was John Muir who invited Roosevelt out and then convinced him to ditch his security and go camping. It was Muir, an activist, a single person.

The impression of his personality was so strong on those who knew him that all words seem cheap beside it. Those who never knew him can never, through any word of ours, be brought to realize what they have missed. He had a quaint, crisp way of talking, his literary style in fact, and none of the nature lovers, the men who know how to feel in the presence of great things and beautiful, have expressed their craft better than he.

We're millions that are crying about John Paul II; his teaching is going to follow us all our life, permanently.