Quotes about Influence

Leadership is much like nuclear energy. It is able to warm a whole city or bring it to waste in death and destruction; it's all in how it is used.

The rich world of his ancestors set the standards for Dietrich Bonhoeffer's own life. It gave him a certainty of judgment and manner that cannot be acquired in a single generation.

How can you change the world? The answer: find seven women, turn them loose, and watch Satan tremble in their presence."

The family trees of Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer are everywhere so laden with figures of accomplishment that one might expect future generations to be burdened by it all. But the welter of wonderfulness that was their heritage seemed to have been a boon, one that buoyed them up so that each child seems not only to have stood on the shoulders of giants but also to have danced on them.

Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.

Wilberforce understood the idea that the law itself is a "teacher" and will lead people toward what it prescribes and away from what it prohibits. But he knew that a debased culture cannot be stemmed through legislation alone. Indeed, if one wishes to make certain laws, one must change the culture first, else those laws will never be passed.

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.