Quotes About Manipulation

Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.

Madame Politics is like Venus: they whom she decoys into her castle perish.

Religion often is misused for purely power-political goals, including war.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; but if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

The camera cannot lie, but it can be an accessory to untruth.

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Speechwriter Barton Swaim cheerfully explains why the opaque may be a virtue. "Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language," he writes, "is not the same as lying: it's not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you're saying something instead of nothing.

Orwell, of course: Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Sir William Haley, one of my predecessors as editor of the Times, said, "There are things which are bad and false and ugly and no amount of specious casuistry will make them good or true or beautiful.

Most of the press is in league with government, or with the status quo.

One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

The most striking feature of the psychopathic personality is his utter lack of empathy. He is incapable of love, incapable of caring, incapable of feeling sorry for anyone but himself. Other people are simply objects to be exploited and manipulated for his own profit and pleasure.

If you are an approval addict, your behaviour is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: Give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game.

There's a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing

There's a way you political folks have of coming round and round a plain right thing; and you don't believe in it yourselves when it comes to practice.

W]e were fighting one another instead of those who'd sent us there. Oh, they're clever these capitalists. It's hard to beat them at their game. They've got us fooled with words like patriotism and duty and honor, and they've got us divided up into classes and religions so that each one of us figures he's better than the other.

A class cannot exist in society without in some degree manifesting a consciousness of itself as a group with common problems, interests and prospects - although this manifestation may for long periods be weak, confused, and subject to manipulation by other classes.

Government is force, pure and simple. There's no way to sugar-coat that. And because government is force, it will attract the worst elements of society - people who want to use government to avoid having to earn their living and to avoid having to persuade others to accept their ideas voluntarily.

It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.

World War II has always been of great interest to me. I've known for decades that it was just one more war the politicians suckered us into.

There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

On the one hand, the Republicans are telling industrial workers that the high cost of food in the cities is due to this government's farm policy. On the other hand, the Republicans are telling the farmers that the high cost of manufactured goods on the farm is due to this government's labor policy. That's plain hokum. It's an old political trick: "If you can't convince 'em, confuse 'em." But this time it won't work.

This is pretty much what the Democratic party has come to: getting to the polls the maximum number possible of the least-informed and most easily swayed voters, and constantly trawling for more.