Quotes About Manipulation

One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense...Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts.

she thinks, 'Oh, this guy cares'... which I didn't. I just want to get her in the vehicle and eventually kill her." - Gary Ridgeway

The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation. At seventy-two abortions per one hundred births, Cuba has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, and Cuban doctors routinely force women to abort high-risk pregnancies so that Cuba's bureaucrats can brag about their health statistics. If you correct the data to account for these factors, Cuba's health statistics look a lot less impressive.5

Mindless, stupid men! Playing with the lives of other men

It's not the meek who are inheriting the earth, Jason, it's the corruptors

Nothing is so convincing as someone who's a bewildered injured party and lets everybody know it.

Oh, God, she loathed them all! Mindless, stupid men. Playing with the lives of other men, knowing so little, thinking they knew so much.

I survive mainly by pleasing others. You do that to get out. To get out you figure out what they want you to say and then you say it with as much skill and originality as possible and then, if they're convinced, you get out.

Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.

All but the most heroically strong among us would slip another step lower in the face of this loss. It is true that hope, no matter how irrational, can sustain us in the darkest of times. But nothing can break us more effectively than hope given and then taken away capriciously. Manipulating these psychological variables is a powerful but double-edged sword.

Logically, gambling shouldn't evoke much anticipatory dopamine, given the astronomical odds against winning. But the behavioral engineering—the 24-7 activity and lack of time cues, the cheap alcohol pickling fronto-cortical judgment, the manipulations to make you feel like today is your lucky day—distorts and shifts the perception of the odds into a range where dopamine pours out and, oh, why not, let's try again.

There is, in short, no great idea that stupidity could not put to its own uses; it can move in all directions, and put on all the guises of truth. The truth, by comparison, has only one appearance and only one path, and is always at a disadvantage.

I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.

Words unconsciously shift thoughts and feelings. One person's 'terrorist' is another's 'freedom fighter'; politicians jockey to commandeer 'family values,' and somehow you can't favor both 'choice' and 'life'.

It's all a matter of leverage.

Remember, all con men are nice people. If they were not being nice by telling you what you want to hear, you would not listen to them.

When it comes to money, there are many people desperate enough to tell and sell you anything, just to get your money.

knowing which words work on which kinds of people.

No matter what the "take-from-the-rich" crowd came up with, the rich always found a way to outsmart them.

How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians—just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them, and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.

Wag the Dog became an international byword for fake wars staged to distract from domestic political problems. Without a doubt, it raised the level of cynicism, which is to say it raised the level of awareness that real events are directed and staged for their political impact.

Democratic representative Pat Schroeder called him "the most evil man in America." Reverend Pat Robertson said, "Lee Atwater has used every dirty trick known to mankind" and "the Republican campaign was blamed for planting specious rumors about the mental-health history of Michael Dukakis." (William Greider, Rolling Stone, 1/12/89)

Then you can go home to the puppeteer worlds and tell them that mucking with human breeding habits is a chancy business. Tell them that enough Teela Browns could make a hash of all the laws of probability. Even basic physics is nothing more than probability at the atomic level. Tell them the universe is too complicated a toy for a sensibly cautious being to play with.

I just wondered if the puppeteers didn't get their name by playing god with the species around them. They've treated humans and kzinti like puppets; there's no denying that.