Quotes About Manipulation

The man in Drawing Room B, Car No. 4, was a newspaper publisher who believed that men are evil by nature and unfit for freedom, that their basic interests, if left unchecked, are to lie, to rob and to murder one another—and, therefore, men must be ruled by means of lies, robbery and murder, which must be made the exclusive privilege of the rulers, for the purpose of forcing men to work, teaching them to be moral and keeping them within the bounds of order and justice.

If there's not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it's evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it - we'll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won't defend himself. He won't feel he's worth it. He won't fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean coscience. He's the man who'll beat us.

You honest men are such a problem and such a headache. But we knew you'd slip sooner or later—and this is just what we wanted. You seem to be pleased about it. Don't I have good reason to be? But, after all, I did break one of your laws. Well, what do you think they're for?

Al serle preguntado cierto día si era capaz de nombrar a un hombre más malvado aún que el que cierra su corazón a la misericordia, respondió: El que utiliza como arma la compasión del otro

If there's not enough guilt in the world, we must create it. If we teach a man that it's evil to look at spring flowers and he believes us and then does it —we'll be able to do whatever we please with him. He won't defend himself. He won't feel he's worth it. He won't fight. But save us from the man who lives up to his own standards. Save us from the man of clean conscience. He's the man who'll beat us.

remembered what he had said to Dominique once: "A complicated piece of machinery, such as our society ... and by pressing your little finger against one spot ... the center of all its gravity ... you can make the thing crumble into a worthless heap of scrap iron ...

Yo he aprendido que una mentira constituye un acto de autoabdicación, porque al mentir rendimos la propia realidad a la persona a quien se miente, convirtiéndola en dueña de una. Y a partir de entonces nos condenamos a fingir la clase de realidad que aquella persona requiere para ser engañada.

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

I don't know what they did to him to make him sign, but I know that it must have been something terrible. Everybody thinks so. Everybody's whispering about it, wondering what sort of pressure was used on him. .

enormes titulares, sus imágenes explícitas y sus textos excesivamente simplificados noqueaban los sentidos y entraban en la consciencia de las personas sin necesidad del proceso intermedio de la razón, como si la comida fuese disparada al recto sin tener que pasar por la digestión.

Soy yo quien te ha destruido desde el principio, ayudándote.

La palabra «Nosotros» es como cal derramada sobre los hombres, que los solidifica y endurece hasta hacerlos de piedra, y que aplasta todo bajo ella, y aquello que es blanco y aquello que es negro se pierden igualmente en su gris. Es la palabra mediante la cual los depravados roban la virtud de los buenos, mediante la cual los débiles roban el vigor de los fuertes, mediante la cual los necios roban la sabiduría de los sabios.

when he was asked whether he could name a person more evil than the man with a heart closed to pity. "The man who uses another's pity for him as a weapon.

he knew that the words they were eager to absorb and believe were the chains slipping in to hold them

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination.

She is a tyrant much in the way of a bad novelist, who shapes his characters according to his own ideology or desires and never allows them the space to become themselves.

We are all capable of becoming the blind censor, of imposing our visions and desires on others.

Lolita diventa il prodotto del sogno di qualcun altro.

She had the satisfaction, so beloved of dictators, of a permanent state of emergency.

Lolita's image is forever associated in the minds of her readers with that of her jailer. Lolita on her own has no meaning; she can only come to life through her prison bars.

The man was starting to get on my nerves. I asked him if he ever worried about becoming too calculating, if the idea of probing people's psyches and gaining their trust just to build an organization ever felt manipulative. He sighed. "I'm not a poet, Barack. I'm an organizer.

In the hands of the shrewd and the ruthless, chaos had proven a gift.

there are people in the world who think only about themselves. They don't care what happens to other people so long as they get what they want. They put other people down to make themselves feel important.

Indifference is exactly what cynical politicians want from you. They're counting on it. Their success depends on convincing you that your vote doesn't matter.