Quotes About Persuasion

Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you has shaken me.

As the cabinet members all said no, Lincoln had summarized: "Seven nays and one aye, the ayes have it"!

If the people believe there's an imaginary river out there, you don't tell them there's no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river

The idea that we must choose between the method of winning hearts and minds and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

So, think about the enormous effort, the enormous, strenuous, and continuous effort to persuade people that things that they merely want are really things that they must have, that they need. And this is the business of marketing and advertising. And as Noam pointed out previously, this completely distorts the notion of the so-called free market in which rational people make rational choices based on real needs.

It is of no particular interest that one man is quite happy to lie in behalf of a cause which he knows to be unjust; but it is significant that such events provoke so little response in the intellectual community—no feeling, for example, that there is something strange in the offer of a major chair in humanities to a historian who feels it to be his duty to persuade the world that an American-sponsored invasion of a nearby country is nothing of the sort.

Marry me, Rebecca...You might as well say yes. I'll just talk you into it.

Then maybe you'll help me convince Mr. MacGregor that I should paint his house. Just watch how you have to twist his arm, Serena said dryly.

When a woman had eyes that big, that brown, that beautiful, she probably got whatever she wanted without saying a word.

People like to say they've given somebody a choice when what they're really saying is 'do this my way.

MetodÄ… nagrody i kary. W ten sposób mo?na kogoÅ› przekona?, ?eby robiÅ' to, co chcemy.

People like to say they've given somebody a choice when what they're really saying is 'do this my way'.

People almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof but on the basis of what they find attractive. —BLAISE PASCAL

Forcing people to "freely" believe is a contradiction in terms. God is love (1 John 4:16), and love cannot work coercively – only persuasively.

Once people decide they want you to do something, they don't really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you're the ideal candidate. This is true in journalism, and in life.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

They're just words is all. Powerless. Vocabulary. Dialogue.

The way to get a babe to act in a blue movie is you offer her a million dollars. The way to get a dude is you just have to ask him.

You get everybody telling the same lie and it ain't a lie, not no more.

People will jump through hoops if you just make them feel like a god.

Every story's trying to say something. It's trying to beam an idea, a message, into the minds of the readers. In this way, every story is an argument. It's the writer making a case.

People believe any horseshit shoved in their ears long as you say 'terrorist.

Lies are like leashes. Tug them just so, and all who believe them will comply.)