Quotes About Manipulation

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

I don't know. I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth—then shut up. It

Our problem is to manipulate the game so that our strength is utilized toward an optimax solution while inducing them to waste their superior strength and to refrain from using it at maximum.

A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers . . . and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible.

There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

You tickle trout by gaining their confidence, and then abusing it.

think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.

Boss, I keep telling you: it's impossible for a woman to lay it on too thick with a man. If you tell a man he's eight feet tall and say it often enough, with your eyes wide and a throb in your voice, he'll start stooping to go through seven-foot doors.) Jake

A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers . . . and its greatest strength is a 'free press' when 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers define what is 'irresponsible.' Do

Wherever there is power and mass to manipulate, Man can live.

Now you know how I fooled you," he would say. "Try to figure out on your own how your congressmen and clergymen fool you. There is no restraint that isn't self-imposed: you are all absolutely free.

Here's what it is, here's what it isn't, now here's why you need to go tell everyone how smart I am.

I am not a donkey to be led by the carrot of salvation and the stick of damnation without thinking of where they are driving me and what they are making me do.

It all rather reminds me of a remark once made to me by Alan Watts: The great error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire 'fell.' It never 'fell.' It still controls the Western world through the Vatican and the Mafia.

Since the publication of Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride, and similar books, it has been realized that techniques of inducing mass hallucination or something like mass hallucination are well known to advertisers.

This species of mass hallucination has been created by conditioning and association. Each advertiser tries to associate his product with something most domesticated primates desire, such as Sex or Status. The commercials carry the association, sometimes fairly blatantly, sometimes subliminally. The repetition of the association gradually produces the conditioned response. The victim is not exactly buying the package as we just said but buying the hope for Sex and Status.

In sum, I don't believe the people who say that the world is controlled by one vile group of conspirators who are running everything, but I believe there are actually a multitude of conspiracies contending in the night.

The semantic time-binding system makes a feedback loop between the verbal left brain hemisphere, the larynx, the right hand (which manipulates the world and checks the accuracy of maps or glosses) and the eyes (which read words and also scan the environment).

You are mistaken, he said smoothly. That boy is not your son. He belongs to society and the State, and I am society and the State. I will take him anywhere I want, I will order him to do anything I care to have done, and I will shoot him if he disobeys.

Wilson emphasizes that this model describes not only many, many infamous criminals, but quite a few of the more infamous statesmen and churchmen of history, who were not called criminals only because they were powerful enough to define what was crime in their society. Since these types have a strong power drive, most of history, as Wilson sees it, is Criminal History, the record of the crimes of one type of male.

I dreamed I called Adolf Hitler on the phone and asked him. What was your gimmick? They believed it was wiser to obey anyone, even me, than to risk anarchy, he said with a ghoulish laugh. And the line went dead with a sharp click like boot-heels snapped together.

Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .

Human beings (domesticated primates) are symbol-using creatures; which means, as the pioneer semanticist, Korzybski, noted, that those who rule symbols, rule us.

Since words contain both denotations (referents in the sensory-existential world) and connotations (emotional tones and poetic or rhetorical hooks), humans can be moved to action even by words which have no real meaning or reference in actuality. This is the mechanism of demagoguery, advertising and much of organized religion.