Quotes About Manipulation

The sight of her child smiling, or the sound of her kitten purring, is rewarding to a mother, in the same sense as food in the stomach is rewarding to a rat in a maze. But once it becomes true that a sweet smile or a loud purr are rewarding, the child is in a position to use the smile or the purr in order to manipulate the parent, and gain more than its fair share of parental investment.

Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

Natural selection favours those genes that manipulate the world to ensure their own propagation. This leads to what I have called the central theorem of the extended phenotype: An animal's behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes 'for' that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.

Words are mostly used to keep us asleep, not to wake us.

To control the deaths of others - when, where, the craft of ensuring it was a cleanly sliced ending - that was possible. And in some strange way, such killing felt like controlling whatever remained of his own life.

intampina cu un zambet aproape tot ce spuneau ceilalti, in parte fiindca, in tinerete, descoperise ca asta ii usura drumul in viata, in parte fiindca era o masca, iar el gasea o mare placere in a-i insela pe ceilalti, castigandu-le increderea, convingandu-i ca n-au de ce sa se teama de el. Ca si tiganii, folosea mai multe masti: a vorbirii, a comportamentului, a personalitatii. Pentru ca, pe dedesubt, sa ramana el insusi.

The first misconception is that it is possible to avoid influencing people's choices.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.

The essence of control is to remain hidden from view, is it not?

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don't, then the agenda makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay.

What you feel is not yours. You need not own it. Creatures like these breed the fear in you as we fatten a buffalo calf, and with similar intent.

Lies are a precious currency—you have to be careful how and where you spend them.

If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.

Part of running a successful tyranny is knowing when and how to let your subjects off the leash, and at this the First Families were accomplished masters.

Served up through the id-feeding Technicolor TV drip that passed for national news coverage, he was just new dosage in a regime already 150 years screen-ingrained.

Like so much of what goes on in the Gash, the overall aim is consumer tranquillity, not truth.

In any agenda, political or otherwise, there is a cost to be borne. Always ask what it is, and who will be paying. If you don't, then the agenda-makers will pick up the perfume of your silence like swamp panthers on the scent of blood, and the next thing you know, the person expected to bear the cost will be you. And you may not have what it takes to pay. Quellcrist Falconer Things I Should Have Learnt By Now Vol II

The essence of control is to remain hidden from view

think, Raquel, you'd cut the laugh out of a toddler's throat with a blunt scalpel if you thought you could sell it for cab fare.

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." --H. L. Mencken

Be particularly alert to any suggestion that you have become selfish or different. (These are red-alert words for us. They are attempts to leverage us back into our old ways for the sake of someone else's comfort, not our own.)

If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.

someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.