Quotes About Persuasion

The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.

Even the revolutionary writer will err if he fails to grasp the enormous effectiveness of occasional understatement.

I tried to get people at 'South Park' into 'Downton Abbey,' and it didn't work. I think they were like, 'Downton Abbey?' What?' And I kinda made a big plea in the writer's room, like, 'Guys, you should really watch it. It's good. It's addicting. My wife and I are obsessed with it.'

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

I don't want them to read what I'm writing and say, 'I think that's right,' and agree with me. I want them to read something and then walk away and be haunted by it.

I may not be sure if monsters exist but I'd rather live my life in doubt than be persuaded by a real experience of one.

The human mind's capacity to persuade itself of things it wants to believe is damn near limitless.

When Churchill was running for office for the first time, he went door to door to ask for votes. He knocked on the door of an irritable man who, when Churchill introduced himself, said, "Vote for you? Why, I'd rather vote for the devil!" "I understand," answered Churchill. "But in case your friend is not running, may I count on your support?

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant.

Egy kicsit ügyes ember könnyebben lesz miniszter, mint irodafÅ'nök. Rá kell erÅ'szakolni magadat az emberekre, nem pedig kunyerálni nekik.

Sé positivo. Las tácticas para asustar son difíciles de digerir y pueden tener un efecto contrario al deseado. Por ejemplo, la advertencia de que «Veinticinco millones de personas se están matando fumando cigarrillos» podría convencer a la gente de que fumar es aceptable porque hay veinticinco millones de personas que lo hacen. Dibuja una imagen realista de los beneficios futuros en vez de intentar asustar a la gente.

Por qué es necesario cautivar? Hay muchos métodos demostrados para ganarse un pavo, un yuan, un euro, un yen, una rupia, un peso o un dracma. Pero cautivar juega en una liga distinta: cuando cautivas a la gente, tu objetivo no es sacarles dinero o hacerles hacer lo que tú quieres, sino llenarlos de una gran satisfacción. He aquí unas cuantas situaciones en las que por encima de todo necesitas cautivar:

Tienen suerte los gobernantes de que los hombres no piensen.» Adolf Hitler

One horse-laugh is worth ten-thousand syllogisms.

An effective introduction should accomplish three objectives. It gets attention, it surfaces a need, and it orients the audience to the body of the sermon. I tried to do that. (You can judge whether I was successful.)

Once poor people are persuaded that their poverty is their own fault, that whoever has made a lot of money must deserve it and that they too could become rich if they tried hard enough, life becomes easier for the rich.

After seeing it work for so long, I began to perceive Charlie's charm as a method of robbing houses by persuading the owners to invite you in and take their possessions. I was in no doubt: it was robbery; there were objects of yours he wanted. And he took them. It was false and manipulative and I admired it tremendously.

Papá me enseñó a coquetear con todo el mundo, chicas y chicos, y acabé por considerar el encanto -y no la cortesía o la franquza, o incluso la decencia- la principal virtud mundana

Sometimes writers like to imagine that the difficulty of becoming a writer resides in convincing others that that is what you are. But really the problem is in convincing yourself.

True goal of totalitarian propaganda is not persuasion, but organization of the polity. ... What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.

Half of politics is image-making, the other half is the art of making people believe the image

The simultaneous decline of the European nation-state and growth of antisemitic movements, the coincident downfall of nationally organized Europe and the extermination of Jews, which was prepared for by the victory of antisemitism over all competing isms in the preceding struggle for persuasion of public opinion, have to be taken as a serious indication of the source of antisemitism. Modern

It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism — an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.

Few ideologies have won enough prominence to survive the hard competitive struggle of persuasion, and only two have come out on top and essentially defeated all others: the ideology which interprets history as an economic struggle of classes, and the other that interprets history as a natural fight of races.