I like Italian movies. I was frequently there in the ’60s, in Rome and the vicinity. It was a great period in life. I was very influenced by their stuff.

The herd seek out the great, not for their sake but for their influence; and the great welcome them out of vanity or need.

I’ve always wanted to do a family movie.

Reputation is the cornerstone of power. Through reputation alone you can intimidate and win; once it slips, however, you are vulnerable, and will be attacked on all sides. Make your reputation unassailable.

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

Being acknowledged for your work is always a great accomplishment, whether it’s people in my city, kids in the street, all the way up to the Grammys.

The truth is often terrifying, which I think is one of the motifs of Larry and Andrew’s cinema. The cost of knowledge is an important theme. In the second and third films, they explore the consequences of Neo’s choice to know the truth. It’s a beautiful, beautiful story.

Whatever starts in California unfortunately has an inclination to spread.

When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‚There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.‘ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.

I’m one of those people who says, ‚yes, cinema died when they invented sound.‘

There are massive efforts on the part of the internet’s corporate owners to try to direct it to become a technique of marginalisation and control.

I was born during the war and grew up in a time of rationing. We didn’t have anything. It’s influenced the way I look at the world.

If I’m going to get you to do stuff, I need to lead you. I can’t just order you to do it.

He who has great power should use it lightly.

I saw ‚Magic Mike,‘ and I thought it was great.

Whenever the speech is corrupted so is the mind.

If you want to get each individual’s honest opinion, you don’t want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

Everybody, to some extent, manipulates. Even children learn to cry when they want something. There are all kinds of subtle things we do to get others to follow our lead, not bother us, and so on.

I am who I am today because of my mother.

There is no power on earth that can neutralize the influence of a high, simple and useful life.

Anywhere I go, there is always an incredible crowd that follows me. In Rome, as I land at the airport, even the men kiss me. I love Rome.

People are usually more convinced by reasons they discovered themselves than by those found by others.

If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

As a Western, ‚The Magnificent Seven‘ was a pretty good film. I don’t think it was as interesting or as multi-faceted as ‚Seven Samurai.‘

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

There’s a big difference, as I’m sure you know, it’s a slightly manneristic one, between people of the ’60s and people of ’68. Being a soixante-huitard – it’s so nice to have a French word for it – is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the ’60s.

Our chief justices have probably had more profound and lasting influence on their times and on the direction of the nation than most presidents.

Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration, since we are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

Sisters, do you realize the breadth and scope of your influence when you speak those things that come to your heart and mind as directed by the Spirit?

I had rather be first in a village than second at Rome.

I believe in that old adage that ‚as goes California, so goes the country.‘

Our enemy, the devil, wants to control us, and his target is our will. The main way he tries to influence our will is through lying to us.

My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. People need somebody to watch over them. Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

What I’d really like to control is not machines, but people.

When I was 8 years old, it mattered what my favorite singer said and wore and expressed opinions about.

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

I realized the power of hip-hop. I realized how influential this music and this culture are.

The skin of my character in ‚The Man Who Fell to Earth‘ was some concoction, a spermatozoon of an alien nature that was obscene and weird-looking.

Everything I learned I learned from the movies.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

If I’m in Rome for only 48 hours, I would consider it a sin against God to not eat cacio e pepe, the most uniquely Roman of pastas, in some crummy little joint where Romans eat. I’d much rather do that than go to the Vatican. That’s Rome to me.

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement.

If you’re treated a certain way you become a certain kind of person. If certain things are described to you as being real they’re real for you whether they’re real or not.

Leadership is influence.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

One of the great pleasures of going to see a Daniel Day-Lewis film: you haven’t seen him in five years. Where have you been? So, it’s a special event, right? Well, if you want to go see a movie that I’m in, it still may be a special event for you, but, you don’t feel like you don’t know where I’ve been.

Alfred Hitchcock once told me, when I was analyzing a lot of things about his pictures, ‚Clint, you must remember, it’s only a movie.‘

Remember that the essence of authority is that people willingly follow your lead.

‚Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.

My folks always let me go to the movies every Saturday. We were really motion-picture goers.

Cinema reflects culture and there is no harm in adapting technology, but not at the cost of losing your originality.

The moment people feel they know what to expect from you, your spell on them is broken. More: You have ceded them power.

People are like dirt. They can either nourish you and help you grow as a person or they can stunt your growth and make you wilt and die.

I would be lying if I didn’t admit sadness that our wonderful airline is merging with another. Because I’m not American, the U.S. Department of Transportation stipulated I take some of my shares in Virgin America as non-voting shares, reducing my influence over any takeover. So there was sadly nothing I could do to stop it.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.