Quotes About Manipulation

For a long time he had wanted to prostitute her, and he was delighted to feel that the pleasure he was deriving was even greater than he had hoped, and that it bound him to her all the more, as it bound her to him, all the more so because, through it, she would be more humiliated and ravaged. Since she loved him, she could not help loving whatever derived from him.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success. This manipulation is sometimes carried out directly by the elites and sometimes indirectly, through populist leaders. As Weffert points out, these leaders serve as intermediaries between the oligarchical elites and the people. The emergence of populism as a style of political action thus coincides causally with the emergence of the oppressed.

It happens, however, that large sectors of the oppressed form an urban proletariat, especially in the more industrialized centers of the country. Although these sectors are occasionally restive, they lack revolutionary consciousness and consider themselves privileged. Manipulation, with its series of deceits and promises, usually finds fertile ground here.

In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a "quick return to power," forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible "dialogue" with the dominant elites. It ends by being manipulated by these elites, and not infrequently itself falls into an elitist game, which it calls "realism.

Without this faith in people, dialogue is a farce which inevitably degenerates into paternalistic manipulation.

As an act of bravery, love cannot be sentimental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipulation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love.

Every move by the oppressed towards unity points towards other actions; it means that sooner or later the oppressed will perceive their state of depersonalization and discover that as long as they are divided they will always be easy prey for manipulation and domination. Unity and organization can enable them to change their weakness into a transforming force with which they can re-create the world and make it more human.

Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building; it is to lead them into the populist pitfall and transform them into masses which can be manipulated.

Welfare programmes as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anaesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems. They splinter the oppressed into groups of individuals hoping to get a few more benefits for themselves.

Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them. They do not liberate, nor are they liberated: they oppress.

language is never neutral

In any conflict, the crazier party generally wins.

The lie felt good because I had taken control of the narrative around me. The

George Orwell has written that "political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."1

Schoenhals calls the rigidity of tifa a "form of power." This simple claim has greater profundity than may appear on the surface. In an obvious sense, it means that holders of power can insist that people say certain things in certain ways and expect that, over time, thought and behavior will follow.

Evil spirits work through people.

Use your enemy's hand to catch a snake.

I thought without his tongue we'd be back in control! And it worked! His tongue is no more!

I'm not actually going to blow you out of the airlock Roberts. I just need you in a quiet place where you won't blurt out something stupid at the wrong time near the wrong watch.

Emotional incest is yet another form of emotional abuse. Emotional incest commonly involves the reversal of the parent/child roles. When this occurs, the mother or father "parentifies" the child who is then manipulated to gratify the unmet childhood needs of the parent. This typically manifests as the parent pumping the child for the unconditional love that she should herself be giving.

The price of admission to a relationship with an extreme narcissist is self-annihilation. One of my clients quipped: "Narcissists don't have relationships; they take prisoners.

a lie, once uttered, changes reality just as surely as if it were a great truth.

Republicans have succeeded with a social agenda that gets people to vote against their own interests while the Democrats are so elitist that they can't tap into the anger that's real.

Trump was often just one yes-man away from doing what he wanted. One attorney general. One military commander. One vice president.