Quotes About Manipulation

Be wary of people who play up to your weaknesses as a way to convince you that you need them in your life. They'll try to make you think you're not smart enough on your own. You're not talented enough, and you need them to make up for what you're lacking. Don't believe those lies.

If you allow it, people will run your life. They'll tell you what to do, where to go, how to dress, and how to spend your money. It's good to get free from addictions, free from anxiety, and free from depression, but one of the greatest freedoms is to get free from controlling people.

Realize that agendas drive data, not the other way round

Tyler seriously considered fabricating an outbreak of salmonella in the hors d'oeuvres and an impending locust plague, either of which would require everyone to leave now.

Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished.

When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.

If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

while Harry Anslinger claimed to be fighting the Mafia, he was in fact transferring a massive and highly profitable industry into their exclusive control.

Harry couldn't control the flow of drugs, but he was discovering he could control the flow of ideas—and it was not only scientists Harry believed he had to silence.

Jean tells me the drug dealers he used to work for are "completely against this program. They can control people in weak states and make money from them. If I was still in the criminal milieu, they could make me a killer, I would do anything." As he said this, I thought of Chino and Rosalio. "But now? No. I am lost for them.

The only means to gain one's ends with people are force and cunning. Love also, they say; but that is to wait for sunshine, and life needs every moment.

Guai a coloro, dissi, che si servono dell'influenza che hanno su di un cuore per rapirgli le semplici gioie che esso sa procurare a se stesso!

"A vain man can never be utterly ruthless: he wants to win applause and therefore he accommodates himself to others"

Divide and rule, a sound motto. Unite and lead, a better one.

Divide and rule, the politician cries; Unite and lead, is watchword of the wise.

How many kings are governed by their ministers — how many ministers by their secretaries? Who, in such cases, is really the chief? He, as it seems to me, who can see through the others, and possesses strength or skill enough to make their power or passions subservient to the execution of his own designs. January

The world is full of little dictators trying to run your life.

Playing with appearances and mastering the arts of deception are among the aesthetic pleasures of life. They are also key components in the acquisition of power.

There're many ways, my dear, to victimize people. The most insidious way is to persuade them that they're victims.

If someone tries to use you as a tool, you shouldn't mind it, because it is their choice and folly, not yours.

What you discover about life's shell game is that it's hardest to follow the pea when you're the pea.

Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.

People would not long remain in social life if they were not the dupes of each other.

Not everyone's life is what they make it. Some people's life is what other people make it.