Quotes About Manipulation

She smiled sweetly at everyone and always acted like a total cooperator—but then she shaped her own world exactly to her liking while nobody was looking.

I'm afraid I'm rather used to females making themselves shameless for me.

She watched his chest rise and fall and remembered and reflected. All her life things had been taken from her: Apollo, Thomas's affection, Mama and Papa, her home, her future. No one had ever asked her opinion, garnered her thoughts on what she wanted or needed. Things had been done to her, but she'd never had the chance to do things. Like a doll on a shelf, she'd been moved about, manipulated, flung aside.

M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades of work in psychology has shown that this just isn't true. Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: You can go in there and change it, but so can other people.

Politics isn't about reality, it's about what you can make people believe is real.

it is much the same, I daresay, wherever and whenever men desire power and the use of power on others.

The man who had spread those rumors first had been a sociopath, a clever criminal—why, now that everyone knew about him, did they still believe his lies?

Men are so easy to manipulate, poor things.

I would never have supposed that inexperienced girl was capable of such cold-blooded, calculating manipulation!

he managed to create an atmosphere of sticky sentimentality that disgusted me.

he never comes to see us unless he wants something. Find out what it is, tell him "no," and let us be off.

Did I ever tell you how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimble of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jena firmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by the nose, and we loved it.

The woman has a beak,' he thought, standing red and tongue-tied before her. 'She's a bird of prey. She has got her talons into my Catherine. Linked together! Good God.

The game is rigged. It is deliberately, persistently, and aggressively rigged to help the rich and powerful get richer and more powerful. Whether mild-mannered men or crazy demagogues are pushing policy decisions, it matters what those decisions are and who they are designed to help.

But he does insist on a conversation. Goddamn it! Why can't people just do what I want them to do and be gone? It's a worldwide conspiracy to make me be polite when I don't want to be.

Chroniclers can edit names out as easily as visionaries can noise them abroad.

Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age.

They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to prevent their putting it into yours.

A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training will stand me in good stead all through my life.

The power of the lie, Daniel said. Always seductive to the powerless.

She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought. The more pictures she saw, the less they meant something that had happened to real people and the more it became possible to pile real people up like that again anywhere you wanted and have your picture taken standing smiling behind them.

If people think you like them, Charlotte said, well, it can go either way. There's a lot of powerplay in liking and being liked. Such a powerful connection, it's a chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That's always a chance we've got.

A fool friend always does something that the enemy wishes.

Pious" is a sword that the clever always use it to eliminate the truth.