Quotes About Persuasion

Words can calm people, can make them them fall in love, can whip them up into a frenzy, can turn them into killers.

It doesn't take a majority to change a society, or a faith. Only a small minority that yells, threatens, kills, that is willing to do anything to prove to themselves that they're right.

Ideolog na czworakach kieruje swoje deklaracje wreszcie do w?a?ciwej cz??ci cia?a tych, których próbuje przekona?.

She would bring him back to us as docile as a sheep. 'Women,' I concluded rather bitterly, 'have at their command certain means of persuasion which the best- organized police forces do not possess.

The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained

He (Larry Summers) can frame arguments with such force and conviction that people think he knows more than he does.

You can actually herd cats. They can't be forced, of course. But if they sense something they want, if there enticed by something good, they'll follow, even in herds.

Public sentiment is everything.13 With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.

Though he recognized that there were many qualities of a successful lawyer, he believed this one virtue trumped all others. "However able and faithful he may be in other respects, people are slow to bring him business if he cannot make a speech.

Information came into the universe when the first hominids began to justify their actions to one another by making assertions and backing those assertions up with further assertions.

The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.

What shall I say? I must tread a fine line between glaciosity and friendlinosity. With just a hint of 'you don't know what you are missing, my fine-feathered friend.

Mrs. Gibson has got her way all her life by leaving things to people's consciences.

You sometimes see in a wind a piece of paper blowing about anyhow. Suppose the piece of paper could make the decision: 'Now I want to go this way.' I say: 'Queer, this paper always decides where it is to go, and all the time it is the wind that blows it. I know it is the wind that blows it.' That same force which moves it also in a different way moves its decisions.

To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.

At the end of reasons comes persuasion.

There is one point, however, on which I wish you would give me a little enlightenment, and that is, how you can rest quietly when you reflect that there is someone who is doing his utmost to persuade others that you are as he sees you, endeavoring firmly to establish you in the estimation of others in accordance with his judgment of you, and to prevent others from seeing and judging you in any other manner?

If she couldn't accept that vampires existed, he'd never convince her to be his life mate.

he must not know how much power he had to move her.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls practical intelligence. To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for for maximum effect.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade...It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you're really like to be.

A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.

a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people—Salesmen—with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups. Who