Quotes About Manipulation

I can read you almost immediately, get your number right away, and push your buttons to make you do whatever I want.

I see you're drinking the Kool-Aid

she had trained him to think she didn't need him.

Model communes are the ones where the leaders lie the best and the biggest.

Give a low man one ounce of power and he'll throw ten thousand pounds of bricks on your head.

When you do things in a soft way, you make the other people believe they've thought up something to do for you, when actually you're directing them." Later, Ruth

To make an ox or water buffalo work so hard, it needs to be blinded and uninformed. That's what the government is doing to the masses now.

Emily looked into his eyes. They were blank, unreadable. That was the worst kind of person, the scariest—the one who'd learned to keep his feelings out of his eyes. Or who didn't feel anything at all. Emily had known people like that; they were the destroyers. They took things—everything you worked for, all your silly dreams—and smashed them beneath their boots for no reason at all.

Didn't he know that she was playing him? The funny thing was that they almost never, ever did. And even after they figured it out, they doubted themselves. Wanted to believe they were wrong. Even when there was no denying that they'd been had, you could almost always go back for a second helping.

She'd spun a web around Maggie's son without his knowing it, without even perhaps her intention. Spider silk was stronger than chain if you happened to be a fly. There

That's how predators work. They give vulnerable people what they want or need, at first. They see a need, a desire, then they exploit, manipulate. When you're hooked, that's when the abuse starts.

Jones still labored under the delusion that he could bend Ricky to his way of thinking, that with anger, hard words, and harsh punishment he could force their son to do and be what he wanted—in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Which was why Skye was in a recliner that went hot and cold more often than Blair and Nate.

When imagination fails, compassion and humaneness dwindle and atrophy along with it. Unleavened by imagination, the variety and richness of life turn into flat abstractions; people become objects to be manipulated -- with the social consequences we know all too well.

Submitting to censorship is to enter the seductive world of 'The Giver': the world where there are no bad words and no bad deeds. But it is also the world where choice has been taken away and reality distorted. And that is the most dangerous world of all.

The guardians with their stern faces had no creative power. But they had strength and cunning, and they had found a way to steal and harness other people's powers for their own needs. They were forcing the children to describe the future they wanted, not the one that could be.

No, amusing me only, I wonder if they realize how they are used? Not a bit. They think they are the emperors of creation. Poor lambs. That's not how I'd describe them. I was thinking of animal sacrifice. Ah. That's closer.

Truth is always War's first victim, the old saying went.

It's so obviously bogus, no one will look for a second layer of, er, bogusity.

exactly what Commander Cavilo wants. It's why she shipped me back

Haroche was crouched to the left of his old comconsole desk, just levering the vent grille out of the wall. In the opened flimsie-folder on the floor by his side lay another fiber filter. Miles laid a small bet with himself that they would find a disemboweled grille awaiting Haroche's return in one of the briefing rooms on a direct line between Illyan's old office and this one. A quick switch, very cool. You think fast, General. But this time I had a head start.

I figure we can tell events exactly as they happened, just leave out that one tiny detail." "You figure, do you? You must be using a different kind of math than the rest of the universe does.

Miles sighed inwardly, wishing he could flood the entire pavilion with fast-penta. The haut were all so damned controlled, they looked like they were lying even when they weren't. "I wonder, haut Kety, if you would introduce me to Governor haut Slyke Giaja. As an Imperial relation of sorts myself, I can't help feeling he is something of my opposite number." The

And as for absolute power, you sir, know what a false chimera that notion is. A shaky illusion, based on—God knows what. Magic. Sleight of hand. Believing your own propaganda.