Henry A. Wallace Quotes

Songs are more powerful than books.

Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

A book doesn't have to be a literary classic, of course, to change us forever.

It's amazing how powerful a piece of work can be and how it can influence people and change. It's pretty interesting.

I think most of the best new work is intended to have much more impact at once.

Ideas are more powerful than people.

Books still accomplish miracles; they persuade men.

Nay, it's not the Devil been leading her astray. It's books! That girl has been nothing but trouble ever since she learned how to read.

Ideas become powerful only if they appear in the flesh; an idea which does not lead to action by the individual and by groups remains at best a paragraph or a footnote in a book.

Reading a book by someone you respect allows some of their brilliance to rub off on you.

I am about to put foward some major ideas; they will be heard and pondered. If not all of them please, surely a few will; in some sort, then, I shall have contributed to the progress of our age, and shall be content.

Time is a function of impact. The longer a book of mine has been in print, the greater its impact seems to be as people absorb and digest my ideas. I am especially proud of The Change Master: Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the American Corporation, first published in 1983, because it raised questions and addressed issues at a time when so many great changes were occurring in our society, indeed throughout the world.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept

Books have always a secret influence on the understanding.

When we read the right book generously, it can change the way think about the world around us.

My life has been more influenced by books than by any other one thing.

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from writer to reader spreads the fire that is fed by the various essences, until it becomes a vast conflagration leaping from forest to forest.

I think that most people go to bookshops and have no idea what they want to buy. Somehow the books sit there, almost magically willing people to pick them up. The right person for the right book. Its as though they know whose life they need to be a part of, how they can make a difference, how they can teach a lesson, put a smile on a face at just the right time.

Pens carry further than rifled cannon.

Even luxuries are arranged according to ideas and ideals, to make them reflect as much of thought-life as possible - and this is Art.

That is the greatest gift my books have given me; what it means and has done for the kids.