Quotes About Manipulation

Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn't evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

People simply can't accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride.

How do you know? Maybe you're just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you're running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet's a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?

Everything's an act. Everything's strategy.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

Advertising tries to knock out your critical thinking by definition. Every tasteless anti-abortion poster, every unfailing-cute child suffering from bowel disease in the local bus shelter, every cartoon bear doing unnatural things with toilet paper is an attempt to rewire your synapses, to literally change your mind.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

We can use logic when we want to, of course. We have tools of reason at our command; but according to at least some experts1 we have those tools not to glean truth from falsehood but to help us win arguments; to make others do what we want; to use as a weapon. It's rhetoric and manipulation that evolution selected for: logic just tagged along as a side effect. Sweeping oratory, rational debate, it's all just a way to bend others to your will.

Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force to all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives.

Throughout the length and breadth of the world, the smart ones sharpen their minds in the schools and universities. In Greece, they sharpen them on the suckers. The more suckers there are around, the more smart ones there are.

Come of it what may, as Sinon said.

Now I am in control!" He followed this statement with a burst of laughter that showed the owner had done a fair share of gloating in his time, and had the basics down pat.

Killing a couple of civilians would be nothing to these people. Don't be taken in by their all sweet, 'we're trying to save the planet propaganda'. This is a murder case.

He's dominant, lass. We've all known people who can make you do things for them and go on doing things until you become ill.

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.

Our sense of power is more vivid when we break a man's spirit than when we win his heart. —Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954)

The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what's happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out. People have invented a 'soft language' to insulate themselves from the truth, he said, 'toilet paper became bathroom tissue … The [garbage] dump became a landfill … Partly cloudy became partly sunny.

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.

O homem era advogado e, por vezes, quando nos armamos em espertos com advogados, eles chamam-lhe desrespeito e metem-nos na cadeia.

A essência do engano não é a mentira que se diz, mas as verdades que se contam para a apoiar.

I told him I was going to betray you, and betray Lyra, and he believed me because I was corrupt and full of wickedness; he looked so deep I felt sure he'd see the truth. But I lied too well. I was lying with every nerve and fiber and everything I'd ever done...I wanted him to find no good in me, and he didn't. There is none.

Then, beaming at Tom and Caul, he topped up their glasses with more wine to wash down the pack of half-truths and outright lies he'd fed them

Everything was ruined! Pennyroyal didn't just know what she'd done, he'd written a book about it! There were paintings! Even if Pennyroyal had twisted the facts, the truth was still there, in black and white on the pages of his book. Hester Shaw had sold Anchorage to the Huntsmen. And when Tom found out …