Quotes About Manipulation

I think that reality TV is so bad. It is a tool by the media to not make people think.

The computer is a tool, just like pencil or charcoal, allowing illustrators to manipulate images from their sketchbooks.

In the hands of a passive-aggressive person who wants to abdicate responsibility for things, texting is a great tool. You can really go nuts.

I think that fear is a mechanism a tool for control.

Music is a very, very powerful tool that filmmakers use to sway people into emotions that they intend you to feel.

Any tool can be used badly.

Does Facebook behave like a tool in my hand, or a firehose designed to spew at me in accordance with other peoples' agendas? Concretely: can I write my own client to present a filtered view of the Facebook stream, or have other people do that for me?

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

Diplomats bluster and bluff, but democracies don't really have that many tools they can use to push back, effectively, against the seductive ideas of dictators.

Flattery was one of Kissinger's principal tools in winning over Nixon, and a tool he employed shamelessly.

A movie like 'Transcendence' may be pertinent in its political reverberations of all computer data held in a cloud and monitored by the NSA, but it also rails against the tools its makers so artfully employ.

Writing is a recording that you can cut up and reassemble. Sound is something you can cut up and reassemble. Film, video - you know, the main tools of culture - can all be cut up and reassembled.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

Mainstream media can be controlled, right. Because messaging from mainstream comes from that particular news outlet or whatever. Then you have the top people driving that messaging, and then that's what it is, right? Social media can really stir up a higher level of panic. If you think about it, it's not controlled.

Torture numbers, and they'll confess to anything.

One of the techniques terrorists employ is to allege torture and mistreatment when they are captured, regardless of whether it is true.

Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

The biggest crime in Nabokov's 'Lolita' is imposing your own dream upon someone else's reality. Humbert Humbert is blind. He doesn't see Lolita's reality. He doesn't see that Lolita should leave. He only sees Lolita as an extension of his own obsession. This is what a totalitarian state does.

Well, like in Orwell books, whom I cherish very much as an author, in classical totalitarian regimes, you always have to make people hate someone. And this hatred is all around the Russian politics.

Totalitarianism is not about some state that appears out of nowhere and suddenly is all-powerful. There can't be any such thing. Totalitarianism starts when the difference between your public life and your private life is effaced.

Political advertising ought to be stopped. It's the only really dishonest kind of advertising that's left. It's totally dishonest.

I don't follow all the 48 laws. Like, I've never crushed anyone totally.