Quotes About Manipulation

He thought of the computer as a less than straightforward tool for controlling and manipulating the world around it, like a shovel with a loose blade.

The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person's reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.

It was the job of people like me to make up reasons, to spin a plausible yarn. And it's amazing what people will believe. Heavy selling out of the Middle East was an old standby. Since no one ever had any clue what the Arabs were doing with their money or why, no story involving Arabs could ever be refuted. So if you didn't know why the dollar was falling, you shouted out something about Arabs.

What's secretly in the water of modern culture is that people enter the world empty. That's a very dangerous idea, because if everybody's empty than other people can get us to do whatever they want because there's nothing in us to stand against it. But if we came to do something that's meaningful, that involves giving and making the world a more beautiful, healthy, lively place, then you become a difficult person to move around and manipulate.

That's what you people do, isn't it? Make assumptions and sell them to impressionable idiots.

Words are tricky things, a friend of his has told him, they're much more tricky than violins.

The Cleese Theory of Convenience. I think, roughly précised, it means that everyone will do only what's most convenient for them – and if you want things done your way you must not appear too agreeable or easy to please, or you will be the victim of other people's desire for convenience.

We may not have a 1984 like George Orwell's, but if the Tories have their way we will be a very carefully controlled society indeed. All very sad, especially as Labour and the left are muddleheaded and ideologically dogmatic.

So the plutocrats direct the legitimate grievances of the middle Americans toward innocent foes, and in return the middle Americans vote for the plutocrats thinking they are thereby defending their own precarious socio-economic interests.

Ehrlichman explained that the Nixon White House "had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. . . . We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify

What we have seen the Russians do is attempt to manipulate public confidence on both sides. So we've seen them encourage people go to a protest on one side; we've seen them simultaneously encourage people to go to that same protest on the other side.

The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is (ideologically) pardoned for sexual activity.

Since the masses are always eager to believe something, for their benefit nothing is so easy to arrange as facts.

Every body and thing has politics involved. Every. Single. Thing.

Bush is the Liberace of Cuban politics. He knows how to play us. He says every single thing they want to hear.

The radical Left wants control over the lives of the American people and will sink to any depths to get it.

Sitcoms are bad in so many ways it's hard to say why. They can hype things as much as they want, but it's all crap, no matter how many TV Guide cover stories there are.

If a person wants to enjoy attention, he will create situations to get it.

I know that sometimes politics creates situations in which people want to say particular things for political reasons.

In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.

Good liars are skilled at reading others well, putting them at ease, managing their own emotions, and intuitively sensing how others perceive them.

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

No, I wouldn't direct a movie, no. I couldn't. I don't have the patience for it, I don't have the people skills. You have to be clever. I'm not really clever in that kind of way. And you have to be able to manipulate people, but at the same time allow them to feel like they are manipulating you, to get the kind of movie that you want.

It's true that the skills required to be a conman are the same as those required for being an actor. Though those skills are in the service of something a bit more noble with acting, I hope.