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Quotes About Manipulation

No matter whether it was true or not—for Adi meant literally his maxim that the bigger the falsehood, the easier to get it believed; people would say you wouldn't dare make up a thing like that.
~ Upton Sinclair
For ten years Adi Schicklgruber had been living in a court; which meant that he had surrounded himself with persons who would tell him what he wanted to hear and nothing else. It was surely not up to Lanny to change that regimen.
~ Upton Sinclair
So it is that political parties degenerate; so the common people give their devotion to a cause, and discover too late how they have been betrayed.
~ Upton Sinclair
Adolf Hitler facts had no meaning except as they served his purpose.
~ Upton Sinclair
Say the very simplest and most obvious things, say them as often as possible, and put into the saying all the screaming passion which one human voice can carry—that was Adolf Hitler's technique
~ Upton Sinclair
When they get through, the country will be in the hands of the very same men who financed Hitler and who will have no idea in the world but to finance some new 'strong' government to keep the Socialists from winning an election.
~ Upton Sinclair
Mark Twain, I believe, is author of the saying that a lie can run all the way round the earth while the truth is putting on its
~ Upton Sinclair
He had been among diplomats enough to learn how they said something which seemed to mean something but didn't; how they put in weasel words which would sneak away with the substance of any sentence.
~ Upton Sinclair
He explained Adi's propaganda technique of choosing a big lie and repeating it incessantly until everybody believed it;
~ Upton Sinclair
some devil was engaged in making a caricature of the democratic process, reducing it to a farce, to prove that the people were incapable of thinking and must really have a master
~ Upton Sinclair
Adolf Hitler had a favorite word, fanaticism, which was hardly ever omitted from any of his speeches, and he had put skilled psychologists and advertising men at work to make certain that the new generations of Germans would never know anything else.
~ Upton Sinclair
in his book that you can get any lie believed if you repeat it often enough; and especially if it's a big lie—because people will say that nobody would dare to tell one as big as that. It is no exaggeration to say that he has made Germany into a headquarters of the Lie; he has told so many and so often that nobody in his country has any means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.
~ Upton Sinclair
All news was propaganda now; you had to learn the special slant of each station and discount its brand of falsification or suppression.
~ Upton Sinclair
These were the men of money, masters of the life of France. They told the workers where to live and what work to do; they told the editors what to publish, and thus told the French public what to believe; they told the politicians how to vote, which meant telling the police whom to arrest and the soldiers whom to shoot.
~ Upton Sinclair
What chance does the democratic tradition stand when its enemies control ninety per cent of the press and the radio and the money—plus all of the weapons? I tell you, the fellows who run the National Association of Manufacturers could take over the government of this country in twenty-four hours if ever they get mad enough to try it. And believe me, they're going to get madder every hour in the economic crisis that will come after this war.
~ Upton Sinclair
Quadratt had, so he claimed, a mailing list of a hundred and fifty thousand names, and seldom a day passed that he didn't write a speech for some Senator or Congressman to deliver. Then it would be printed as part of the Congressional Record, reprinted at a nominal cost by the Government Printing Office, and mailed out to these names, and to other lists supplied by Nazi or near-Nazi organizations scattered all over the country.
~ Upton Sinclair
Having bought so many politicians in his day, the Baron could hardly be blamed for taking a cynical attitude to the breed; now, since they were refusing to stay bought, he could hardly be blamed if he had decided to get rid of them.
~ Upton Sinclair
The dream of every dictator was to get exclusive control of that colossal instrument, so that never again in all history would it be possible to answer back. Then what you said would become the truth and the only truth—no matter how false it might have been previously! He who could get and hold the radio became God.
~ Upton Sinclair
Only two newspapers now on the kiosks, both humbly subservient—one, Le Matin, and the other, oddly enough, La Victoire! It wouldn't be many days before the Nazis would revive others—the old names but new policies. Already they had taken over the radio stations, and had set up loudspeakers in the public squares, to tell the French what they were going to think for the next thousand years.
~ Upton Sinclair
There's a thing called narcissistic personality disorder. People who have an inflated sense of their own importance, a lack of empathy for others. They're vain, they crave the power over others they think they deserve. They can be arrogant and callous. They think they're better than everybody else and they don't care who they trample on in their desire to get what they want.' 'A bit like Donald Trump, then?
~ Val McDermid
What it had done, however, was to give him a feeling of power and control that had taken him back to how he used to feel every day.
~ Val McDermid
Although narcissists can appear charismatic, that charm is always and only exercised in the service of their own greater glory. They disregard the feelings and the interests of others and are often skilled at manipulating them into providing what the narcissist wants right here, right now. From Reading Crimes by DR TONY HILL
~ Val McDermid
Uno de los medios de los que se sirve el fascismo para actuar sobre el hombre es la total, o casi total, ceguera. El hombre no cree que vaya al encuentro de su propia aniquilación.
~ Vasily Grossman
When people are to be slaughtered en masse, the local population is not immediately gripped by a bloodthirsty hatred of the old men, women and children who are to be destroyed. It is necessary to prepare the population by means of a special campaign. And in this case it is not enough to rely merely on the instinct for self-preservation; it is necessary to stir up feelings of real hatred and revulsion.
~ Vasily Grossman