Quotes About Manipulation

In any power game, it seems, the dominant party is the least likely to be aware of what is going on.

Dealing with police and politics were the pivotal props of the system...

One of the most irritating features of Mr de Valera's behaviour at this time was, having used every device of a practised politician to gain his point, having shown himself relentless and unscrupulous in taking every advantage of generous opponents, he would adopt a tone of injured innocence when his shots failed, and assume the pose of a simple, sensitive man, too guileless and gentle for this rough world of politics.108

The American people are suckers," Nixon said. "Gray Middle America—they're suckers.

The ability to represent failure as success would become an Agency tradition.

and throughout the summer and fall of 2002, the president and his aides prepared the battlefield of the American mind with apocalyptic warnings about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction: Baghdad had chemical and biological weapons, and it could build a nuclear weapon in a few years. The alarms were terrifying, and utterly false. The cause for war was an illusion.

The Russians were a nation of stage managers, Kennan wrote at the end of the war, and their deepest conviction was that things are not what they are, but only what they seemed to be.

Americans who know nothing of Andropov may be nonetheless familiar with aspects of the work of Service A—as is anyone who has ever heard that the CIA killed President Kennedy, or that the FBI assassinated Martin Luther King, or that the army invented the AIDS virus in a germ-warfare lab, all falsehoods broadcast and published and perpetuated by Andropov's officers and agents.

Andropov's KGB sought to change the course of history by rewriting it, to shape the policies of a foreign government and the thinking of its citizens by bending and warping them. It would steal an election when it was up for grabs, weaken the alliances of its enemies when it could, discredit foreign leaders and undermine their political institutions when it saw the opportunity. These stratagems were the core of the curriculum for Putin's education in the KGB.

They were appalled by his idea of making a spy service out of a scattershot collection of Wall Street brokers, Ivy League eggheads, soldiers of fortune, ad men, news men, stunt men, second-story men, and con men.

He saw "new propaganda" emerging, and he said its goal was "not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid." RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left.

The Bureau had conducted uncounted break-ins and black-bag jobs on Hoover's say-so. The

Marat Mindiyarov, an unemployed teacher who lasted four months at the IRA, said the job required him "to write that white is black and black is white. Your first feeling, when you ended up there, was that you were in some kind of factory that turned lying, telling untruths, into an industrial assembly line.

The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming. In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction. He

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.

But at the time, she was too scared to do anything. His reach into the cops and courts, he told her, was beyond anything she could imagine.

Steve offered to pay his victim a month's salary if she would write a statement saying he had not attacked her. She refused. But because she was engaged and worried about what her fiancé would think if she had to go through a trial with a man who would try to destroy her, she backed off. The case disappeared.

He told her he "controlled every court in Indiana." For $30, he could get someone to sign an affidavit to anything he dictated, he boasted. For $50, he could get a man killed.

They also bombed their own headquarters—and blamed it on Catholics.

D. C. Stephenson was telling the state's top elected officials what to do. And they followed the Klansman's every order.

He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.

The Power of Persuasion by Robert Levine. The