Quotes About Manipulation

Art is the manipulation of someone else's imagination.

There are two hundred million idiots, manipulated by a million intelligent men.

Sometimes I feel like God…when I order someone killed – they die the same day.

Dealing with backstabbers, there was one thing I learned. They're only powerful when you got your back turned.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Flattery is like chewing gum. Enjoy it but don't swallow it.

The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed.

Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.

Diplomacy: lying in state.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

If you torture statistics long enough, they'll eventually confess the truth

Lawyers-a profession it is to disguise matters.

It is simpler and easier to flatter people than to praise them.

It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it was their own idea.

Art functioning as propaganda is not art.

Never tell anyone to go to hell unless you can make 'em go.

A man who tosses worms in the river isn't 't necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm's got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.

Killing you is not the worst thing they can do to you, " I say. "Controlling you is.

I have converted the machinery of my fate into the servant of my will.

The techniques of behavioral control make even the hydrogen bomb look like a child's toy.

You don't have any morals, do you, Senator? You're worse than me, do any fucking thing to get what you want." Against his chest she said, "Some people are chosen, Ray. I'm one of those. I make morals, I don't follow them." "I like that. You make morals. That's good." She said, "Morals are for the masses, the little people, to keep them from too much independent thinking.

The lies the government and media tell are amplifications of the lies we tell ourselves. To stop being conned, stop conning yourself.

Even the apparently unreliable narrator is more often than not reliably unreliable. Think of Kazuo Ishiguro's butler in The Remains of the Day, or of Bertie Wooster, or even of Humbert Humbert. We know that the narrator is being unreliable because the author is alerting us, through reliable manipulation, to that narrator's unreliability. A process of authorial flagging is going on; the novel teaches us how to read its narrator. Unreliably

One gift, one time--that's bribery. Lots of gifts over a long time--that's politics.''-- Roland Vanatua, from The Coup