Michael Portillo Quotes

Not only can you not plan the impact you're going to have, you often won't recognize it even while you're having it.

I want to be able to say on my deathbed that I reached a few people. That would be very nice, just to be able to say that.

I hope I left behind a legacy that people will enjoy. But whatever they want to say, I can't predict.

When you touch the life of a man of this generation, that influence is felt through generations yet to come.

To know that someone decades later is still just as impactful as they were when they were alive, we need pioneers like that.

There is a certain immortality in the change that another person effects on another person.

There's one form of immortality I like to think about. It's that all those who from the very first have given anything to the world are living in the world to-day.

Life cannot be cut off quickly. One cannot be dead until the things he changed are dead. His effect is the only evidence of his life. While there remains even a plaintive memory, a person cannot be cut off, dead. And he thought, “It’s a long slow process for a human to die. We kill a cow, and it is dead as soon as the meat is eaten, but a man’s life dies as a commotion in a still pool dies, in little waves, spreading and growing back toward stillness.

Kind words and good deeds are eternal. You never know where their influence will end.

The influence of each human being on others in this life is a kind of immortality.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

We are always impacting the world...through our presence, energy, interactions - what kind of impact are we having?

Don’t underestimate the ripple effect of what you do. These kinds of actionshave toppled empires.

It's not what you have at the end of life, it's what you leave behind that matters.

Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence." (Harvard Business School definition of leadership)

We never know which lives we influence, or when, or why.

...no-one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away... The span of someone's life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.

Brothers, what we do in life........echoes in eternity.

The blossom cannot tell what becomes of its odor, and no person can tell what becomes of his or her influence and example.

Were a star quenched on high,For ages would its light,Still travelling downward from the sky,Shine on our mortal sight. So when a great man dies,For years beyond our ken,The light he leaves behind him liesUpon the paths of men.

What I leave behind has a life of its own.

A person's shadow stood for his legacy, his impact on the world. Some people cast hardly any shadow at all. Some cast long, deep shadows that endured for centuries.

You wanna be remembered for making an impact and changing things.And I guess for the good or for the bad, it don't matter. But I guess you just wanna be remembered when it's all said and done.

Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his design;--and posterity seem to follow his steps as a train of clients.

Every noble life leaves the fibre of it interwoven forever in the work of the world.