Quotes About Manipulation

A country that does not know how to read and write is easy to deceive.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything.

stories are not always innocent;...they can be used to put you in the wrong crowd, in the party of the man who has come to dispossess you.

In the end I began to understand. There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like. Just as in corrupt, totalitarian regimes, those who exercise power over others can do anything. They can bring out crowds of demonstrators whenever they need them.

This was what British administration was doing among the Ibos, making a dozen mushroom kings grow where there was none before.

Satan is always content to hide in the shadows of a worldview if he can exploit that worldview to his own ends.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve. (Think about that for a moment.)

Aren't we all pawns in the hands of time, the greatest player of them all?

You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat." "You're selling yourself short." "I've just sold myself for rat meat," she said, and she turned from him and lit the stove.

Chiltington was a snake. Worse. A garden slug. Maybe a leech. Something oily and slimy that left a greasy trail and liked to mooch off other people's ideas.

Political leaders, who use the tools of mass propaganda to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens, no longer need to be competent, sincere, or honest. They need only to appear to have these qualities. Most of all they need a story, a personal narrative.

Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious.

Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.

The ability to amplify lies, to repeat them and have surrogates repeat them in endless loops of news cycles, gives lies and mythical narratives the aura of uncontested truth. We become trapped in the linguistic prison of incessant repetition. We are fed words and phrases like war on terror or pro-life or change, and within these narrow parameters, all complex thought, ambiguity, and self-criticism vanish.

Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing products. It is created by manipulating the prices of currencies, stocks, and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.

Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, tel- evision and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photogra- phers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters.

They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom of speech, the right to assembly, and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power internally that democracy is extinguished. The Constitution remains in place but has been so radically reinterpreted by the courts and by the executive and legislative branches of government, all serving corporate power, as to be essentially nullified.

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," Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.67

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exists. HANNAH ARENDT, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities," Voltaire warned.

The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society's zeitgeist.

In every deed of mischief he had a heart to resolve, a head to contrive, and a hand to execute.

If you employ an army, have money, bombard cyberspace with misinformation, innocent people tend to buy it.