Quotes About Manipulation

there is no final inner cabal, no capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses) pulling the strings: the final instance 'calling the shots' (often literally) is the market economy itself.

Tienen suerte los gobernantes de que los hombres no piensen.» Adolf Hitler

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

Public opinion, in its raw state, gushes out in the immemorial form of the mob's fear. It is piped into central factories, and there it is flavored and colored, and put into cans.

If Franklin Delano Roosevelt became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he needs so sorely, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House yard come Wednesday.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

There are some politicians who promise something for everyone. If their constituents were cannibals, would promise them missionaries for dinner, fattened at public expense.

It takes advantage of every passing craze and delusion of the mob to dispose of those who oppose it, and it maintains a complex and highly effective machine for launching such crazes and delusions when the supply of them lags.

They are brothers to the fox who boasted that he had made the hounds run....

Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.

Það hafa sagt mér frændur mínir, að þá er norræn kona ann manni um alla hluti fram, kaupi hún með legorði sínu af flugumanni að hann drepi elskhuga hennar, en taki síðan vegandann til eignar sér.

I know you so well, and you'll feel guilty, simplifying everything, putting the emphasis here or there according to your interest.

I've learned that unfeeling, bloodsucking men like you need to reduce women to manageable cliches, even to destroy them, for the sake of control.

After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie's charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I admired it tremendously.

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.

The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.

Half of politics is image-making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.

The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility: he can never admit an error.....The propaganda effect of infallibility, the striking success of posing as a mere interpreting agent of predictable forces, has encouraged in totalitarian dictators the habit of announcing their political intentions in the form of prophecy....Mass leaders in power have one concern wich overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true.

Banality is the adopted disguise of a very powerful will to abolish conscience.

all facts that did not agree, or were likely to disagree, with the official fiction—data on crop-yields, criminality, true incidences of "counter-revolutionary" activities as distinguished from the later conspiracy fictions—were treated as non-facts.

Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States. Because of the immensity of his job, he must surround himself with advisers, the National Security Managers, as they have been recently called by Richard Barnet, who exercise their power chiefly by filtering the information that reaches the President and interpreting the outside world for him.

It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism — an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.