Quotes about Influence

The people who change lives are the ones who point us away from the world's short-term perspective to God's long-term perspective. Life on earth is a dot, a brief window of opportunity; life in Heaven (and ultimately on the New Earth) is a line going out from that dot for eternity. If we're smart, we'll live not for the dot, but for the line.

The power of the words we speak is far greater than we realize. "Life and death is in the power of the tongue" (Proverbs 18:21).

Historic figures have homes to visit for posterity; the Lord of history left no home. Luminaries leave libraries and write their memoirs; He left one book, penned by ordinary people. Deliverers speak of winning through might and conquest; He spoke of a place in the heart.

Are we really ever completely our own person or have we been conditioned in ways beyond our own imagination?

Our lives are shaped by others literally from birth, and even the best of intentions can result in the most unexpected of hurts.

After the Vietnam War, a lot of us [antiwar graduate students] didn't just crawl back into our library cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for awhile—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.2

Young dreams may be wild ones, but they are never corrected by ridiculing them. They must be steered by a loving voice that has earned the right to be heard, not one enforced by means of power.

Marcello Pera, the atheist philosopher and former Italian politician, has argued powerfully that Western love of liberty, equality, and brotherhood simply wouldn't exist without the Christian message.4

Once you have gained a following of such magnitude; once you can do no wrong by virtue of the adulation you receive; once you are one of the richest people in the world and can buy the companies that sponsor you; once you have a magical impact on the minds of people… is it not a short step to playing god in the minds of your followers?

But there is more to it than that. My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known—not the famous, not saints, but

How did I get here? Somebody pushed me. Somebody must have set me off in this direction and clusters of other hands must have touched themselves to the controls at various times, for I would not have picked this way for the world.

The important thing is to keep them pledging," he explained to his cohorts. "It doesn't matter whether they mean it or not. That's why they make little kids pledge allegiance even before they know what 'pledge' and 'allegiance' mean.