Quotes about Influence

A man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal.

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events

The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds.

Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth and beauty that mattered.

My fate cannot be mastered; it can only be collaborated with and thereby, to some extent, directed. Nor am I the captain of my soul; I am only its noisiest passenger.

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

Power and wealth increase in direct proportion to a man's distance from the material objects from which wealth and power are ultimately derived.

Happiness is a hard master - particularly other people's happiness.

Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can't. Whenever the masses seized political power, then it was happiness rather than truth or beauty that mattered. Happiness has got to be paid for. It hasn't been very good for truth of course. But it's been very good for happiness.

Thanks to technological progress, Big Brother can now be almost as omnipresent as God.

The Machiavelli of the 20th century will be an advertising man, his Prince , a textbook of the art and science of fooling all the people all the time.

People, he was beginning to understand, are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture. It brings them to flower; but it also nips them in the bud or plants a canker at the heart of the blossom.