Quotes about Influence

I thank God that I live in the age of Wilberforce and that I know one man at least who is both moral and entertaining.

When it was all over, Pitt had overwhelmingly won the House of Commons, and as politically weak as he was before the election, he was now strong. It was an historic and glorious reversal, and little Wilberforce was at the very center of it all.

You can talk about right and wrong and good and bad all day long, but ultimately people need to see it. Seeing and studying the actual lives of people is simply the best way to communicate ideas about how to behave and how not to behave. We need heroes and role models.

By the time Whitefield died in 1770, an inconceivable 80 percent of the population of the American colonies had heard him preach at least once.

As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther's Bible created a single German tongue. Suddenly millers from München could communicate with bakers from Bremen. Out of this grew a sense of a common heritage and facilitating communication among diverse regions.

The good leader serves others and leads others to maturity.

It is the universal corruption and profligacy of the times, which taking its rise amongst the rich and luxurious has now extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people.

What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success.

Newton didn't tell him what he had expected—that to follow God he would have to leave politics. On the contrary, Newton encouraged Wilberforce to stay where he was, saying that God could use him there.

The Luther Bible was to the modern German language what the works of Shakespeare and the King James Bible were to the modern English language. Before Luther's Bible, there was no unified German language.

When Wilberforce's mother and grandfather sent him to live with his aunt and uncle, they hadn't the slightest idea that they were sending the boy into a glowing hotbed of Methodism.

Wilberforce's time at Cambridge over two hundred years ago sounds extraordinarily like the experience of many college students today.