Quotes About Persuasion

The path of least resistance leads directly from inevitability to eternity. If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.

Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler "has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.

Just stories? Stories can build up an empire, or strike down a people. You can spell the most powerful spell, ease a friend's hurt, or break an enemy. Stories make you believe.

Why do we believe one stranger and not another?

Instead of authority and consequence (the management staples of the factory floor), the best knowledge-work managers are known for their powers of persuasion, negotiation, markers to call in, and their large reserves of accumulated trust.

Oh mortal man, is there anything you cannot be made to believe?

My old man used to say that I would argue the hind leg of a donkey. If I didn't agree with something, I wasn't prepared to accept it.

I know why politicians want to go on TV: that's where really old people are. And old people vote.

I think that Jamie Oliver did more good for the nation's cooking when he was just cooking than by telling us what chickens we should eat.

You can get an audience no matter what your opinion is.

Arguments only confirm people in their own opinions.

If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person

You see, it is a very dangerous thing to listen. If one listens one may be convinced; and a man who allows himself to be convinced by an argument is a thoroughly unreasonable person.

There is no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from a scientific point of view.

Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods.

Detesto todos los argumentos! Son siempre vulgares, y a menudo convincentes.

There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.

But love, resistless love, my soul invades, discretion this, affection that perswades. I see the right and I approve it too, condemn the wrong and yet the wrong pursue.

We run to height a bit in our family, and there's about five-foot-nine of Aunt Agatha, topped off with a beaky nose, an eagle eye, and a lot of grey hair, and the general effect is pretty formidable. Anyway, it never even occurred to me for a moment to give her the miss-in-baulk on this occasion. If she said I must go to Roville, it was all over except buying the tickets.

A man thinks he is being chilled steel – or adamant, if you prefer the expression – and suddenly the mists clear away and he finds that he has allowed a girl to talk him into something frightful. Samson had the same experience with Delilah.

Lady Underhill, having said all she had to say, recovered her breath and began to say it again. Frequent iteration was one of her strongest weapons. As her brother Edwin, who was fond of homely imagery, had often observed, she could talk the hind-leg off a donkey. You

A more practised physiognomist would have been able to interpret that look. It was the one that butlers always wear when they have allowed themselves to be persuaded against their better judgement into becoming accessories before the fact in the theft of their employers' pigs.

beggars approached the task of trying to persuade perfect strangers to bear the burden of their maintenance with that optimistic vim which makes all the difference.

I don't suppose that anything you say or anything I say will make the slightest damn bit of difference. You need dynamite to dislodge an idea that has got itself firmly rooted in the public mind.