My mother was a big influence. She kept pushing me because I was very shy and inhibited. And schoolwork was very difficult for me because I couldn't concentrate. I was failing almost every subject. To this day, I'm not too good at reading a book. But I was the president of my high school comedy group, and they treated me like a king.

It seems fair to say that while the moral standards of the nineteenth century persisted almost unchanged into the twentieth, moral practices changed sharply, and that though the standards of the nineteenth century persisted the institutions that had sustained them and the sanctions that had enforced them lost influence and authority.

I get good references from a wide range of music. Something who's been a good influence in the last few years is Qawwali music. If you listen to a Qawwali singer like Aziz Mian - he's like James Brown. Qawwali is like Pakistani gospel-jazz. It's emotional, but it's also improvised, and it's all about that sacred-and-profane tightrope.

Unlike President Obama, I would say that I support the long-standing bipartisan post-war belief that American global strength and leadership secures our national-security interests, and it also promotes order and stability in the world. And it gives us immense influence in the world and deters our adversaries and reassures our allies.

A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

I don't think that much change comes from economists. I think it comes more from political realities. Probably the two giants of the 20th century, who actually did shift government policy in the U.S. and around the world, were John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. I don't see anybody in our system who is at that level of influence.

Sam Cooke had a huge influence on me. He left the gospel field at one point and went into the secular, and he had this huge hit, 'You Send Me.' Irma, my older sister, and I heard 'You Send Me' on the radio while we were driving through the South one night. We had to stop the car. We got out and danced around the car out on the highway.

My parents' example of a loving, caring relationship, I think, has affected my songwriting a ton and allowed me to start writing love songs that people could connect to without sounding like you're being cheesy, because they're coming from a real place, something that I saw coming up. I think they're a huge influence on my songwriting.

In terms of influence, my style icons have been a mixture of Julie Andrews and Olivia Newton-John. When I was little I used to watch 'Grease,' 'Mary Poppins' and 'The Sound of Music' a lot. If you put all those things together you do kind of get my outfits. A slightly tarty nanny in a second-hand outfit. That is pretty much what I wear.

Those who have had the most impact and influence throughout history and certainly the people who've had the most impact and influence on me personally have been basically entirely unaware of any such influence and made their chief concern their personal devotion and obedience, and the pleasure of God in the hidden things of their lives.

I truly believe that we're about to enter a second golden age of design. The first one was in the '50s and '60s, when designers like Raymond Loewy, Charles Eames, George Nelson and Dieter Rams were shepherds of the brands they were working with. They had influence over the products and how companies communicated and promoted themselves.

My view is that the cyber threat is bigger than any one government agency - or even the government itself. But the FBI brings a rare combination of scope and scale, experience, and tools to the mix. We investigate criminal activity like intrusions and cyber attacks, but we also investigate national security threats like foreign influence.

One thing I've learned through all the ups and downs is that if you're doing things right, then you have a core group of people. Not just a core group like your homies or your buddies, but a group of people that has a good influence on you, who you respect and admire, and you know that if they're on your side, you're doing something right.

Happy for America, happy for Europe, perhaps for the world when, on the delivery of Cornwallis's sword to the illustrious, the immortal Washington, or rather by his order, to the brave Lincoln, the sun of Liberty and Independence burst through a sable cloud, and his benign influence was, almost instantaneously, felt in our remotest corners!

In the U.S. you have a system of lobbying and influence on our policy and law makers which is incredibly pronounced. The gas industry spent $250 million getting an exemption from our Safe Water Act. Every one of those dollars is toxic; a contaminant in our political system. It disrupts the normal flow of justice, science, fact and reporting.

Pristine vulnerability is just so boring to me. The performances that I love are ones like Gena Rowland's in 'A Woman Under the Influence,' where women are allowed to be messy and imperfect. It's that kind of woman that has always inspired me to seek roles that are a little out of the box. I just haven't always had the opportunity to do them.

Frankly, in order for us to have a healthier arts eco-system funders need to insulate their relationships with artists from the influence of moneyed interests, lobbying groups, and politics. The funders shouldn't have to parse their words, or say one thing to one group and another to another. One statement, freedom of expression, end of story.

The Russians will always find a pretext for their aggression. It was Putin who said in 2005 that the biggest geopolitical disaster of the last century was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Putin wants to bring Ukraine back into the Russian sphere of influence. That is why he tried everything in order to stop the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement.

As an undergraduate, I took two writing workshops taught by Elizabeth Hardwick. She was certainly a major influence, though more as a writer I greatly admired than as a teacher. As for other writers, I think it's safe to say that my work has been and continues to be influenced to one degree or another by every writer whose work I love and admire.

It is our duty not to not only hold fast, but to hold forth the Word of life; not only to hold fast for our own benefit, but to hold it forth for the benefit of others, to hold it forth as the candlestick holds forth the candle, which makes it appear to advantage all around, or as the luminaries of the heavens, which shed their influences far and wide.

Neil Young, who isn't really evident when you listen to my music, is probably my favorite of the legends, besides Dylan. They're all a huge influence on me. For me, just following rock history and watching Darkness On the Edge of Town and realizing that's it's okay to be obsessed with a snare sound because Bruce Springsteen was obsessed with a snare sound.

News has a way of distancing us from events, even as it informs us about them. News articles almost always present both the event and the responses at the same time - how is President Barack Obama or Congress responding to the events? I think this reflects a deep need we have to feel that things are under control and that events are subject to our influence.

In almost every computation a great variety of arrangements for the succession of the processes is possible, and various considerations must influence the selections amongst them for the purposes of a calculating engine. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

I would like to meet with Drake. I would love to meet him. He's from the city I'm from. I feel we share the same interests and I'm really just into his music and him as a person in general. He's great at what he does. I would want to meet Eminem. He was my first ever influence. The reason why I even started writing was because my mom bought me my first Eminem CD and I was glued from there.

As for the influence on my writing,music has definitely influenced how I write. That idea of cadence, repetition, all those elements appear throughout my writing. Drumming has definitely had a huge influence on the way I write, too. Has definitely tuned my ear to rhythm. After I've written something, I'll go through it repeatedly, carefully listening to the construction of the words, seeing, hearing how they flow.

Vladimir Putin would like to have more influence in Ukraine. He would like to have Ukraine always knocked slightly off balance so that they don't know what he might do next. He would like to demonstrate that he has more power than the Ukrainians do. And so certainly by making a frozen conflict situation where Ukraine never really has a definitive sense of sovereignty over its own territory, that's in Putin's interest.

Fashion is made up of paradoxes. There was a key moment in fashion. When the Japanese first arrived - Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and all - I have to humbly admit that I didn't understand the importance of it at all. It was Jean-Jacques Picart who explained it to me. They had a huge influence in that they showed that aestheticism could be different from prettiness, that there was beauty and that beauty was beyond pretty.

My one concern is that Hu Jintao may overestimate how much power China has in Pyongyang. They have - they do have influence, and they do have companies, and they do have economic relationships that could make life much more difficult in the north. Their balancing act is, "How much worse can we make it in the north without creating that which scares us more than anything, which is a collapse in the north." And then what happens to all those nuclear weapons. So they're going to work very hard to avoid that.

Being able to influence the outcome, being able to do something about it, to be able to stop the bleeding. You're not being useful if you're just standing there going "Oh, that's awful!" You're only useful if you actually do something about it and I think that goes for everything. If you actually do something about what's in front of you, then you are actually contributing and you haven't got time to be self-centred or sorry for yourself. You should be doing something about the person you really should feel sorry for.

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