Quotes About Manipulation

Kill him before he makes you love him.

A flow of words is a sure sign of duplicity.

Madame de Nucingen was already there, dressed with the deliberate aim of appealing to all eyes, knowing that thereby she would seem even more attractive to Eugène.

Women always persuade men they have made into sheep that they are lions with a will of iron.

La flatterie n'émane jamais des grandes âmes, elle est l'apanage des petits esprits qui réussissent à se rapetisser encore pour mieux entrer dans la sphère vitale de la personne autour de laquelle ils gravitent. La flatterie sous-entend un intérêt. (p.239/317)

Give a Paris woman at bay four-and-twenty hours, and she will overthrow a ministry.

Alas! Where love is concerned, self-interested deception is superior to the truth itself, which is why so many men pay so high a price to clever deceivers.

There is still a way to harmonize all interests," said Solonet, uttering this sentence in a high falsetto tone, which silenced the other three and drew their eyes and their attention upon himself. This young man was not unlike a skilful coachman who holds the reins of four horses, and amuses himself by first exciting his animals and then subduing them.

Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.

It looked like girls were controlled by their feelings but the opposite was true. Girls had excellent control of their feelings. They spun them around like batons: Now I'm crying! Now I'm laughing! Who knows what I'll do next! Not you! A boy's emotions were like baseball bats that blindsided him.

It looked like girls were controlled by their feelings but the opposite was true. Girls had excellent control of their feelings. They spun them around like batons: Now I'm crying! Now I'm laughing! Who know what I'll do next! Not you! A boy's emotions were like baseball bats that blindsided them.

Her mother specialized in the tiny razor-sharp dig wrapped in a soft compliment, so you didn't notice the blood until afterward.

She could bully anyone into buying anything.

I won't get involved in any school politics," she'd said, and someone up there had overheard and hadn't liked her attitude. Far too confident. "We'll see about that," they'd said, and then sat back and had a good old laugh at her expense.

How dare this smug little plastic stick have the power to decide her future?

long time for her to reinstall her personality after he'd systematically taken it apart, making her doubt her every thought.

The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.

It's easy to get rid of people, Christophe. All you have to do is rely on them.

Sometimes you can pick who buys you, and for how much. That's what power really is.

Everyone was nice when they wanted something from you —was it a divinity thing, or just a basic natural fact?

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all the people all of the time.

I take it these people have some sense; they see plainly that Judge Douglas is playing cuttlefish, a small species of fish that has no mode of defending itself when pursued except by throwing out a black fluid, which makes the water so dark the enemy cannot see it, and thus it escapes.

Power is what men seek, and any group that gets it will abuse it. It is the same story.

By facing your own hypocrisy, you begin to grow beyond it (while recognizing that you can never get full command of your hypocrisy because you can never get full command of your egocentricity). When you recognize it in others (especially those of status), they are less able to manipulate you.