Quotes About Persuasion

The net effect of Clarence Darrow's great speech yesterday seemed to be precisely the same as if he had bawled it up a rainspout in the interior of Afghanistan.

Everybody knows that there's a liberal, that there's a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents.

There are men who, by their sympathetic attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the human race.

The way your parents try to talk to you about politics and pull you to their side, that's an exciting moment in your family.

There is literally no such thing as an idea that cannot be expressed well and articulately to today's voters in thirty seconds.

Politics, in a sense, has always been a con game.

A politician has an axe to grindWith which he aims to chop off half your mind.

The lives of all of us have been moulded largely by induction through suggestion.

Constant repetition carries conviction.

The only people in the world who can change things are those who can sell ideas.

One comes to believe whatever one repeats to oneself sufficiently often, whether the statement be true of false. It comes to be the dominating thought in one's mind.

Good salesmanship is nothing more than maximizing the positive and minimizing the negative.

Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.

People enjoy convincing others, if others are wrong they convince them towards right, if others are already right they still want to convince them towards wrong.

You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word.

People are submissive to power, and few of them can be influenced by doctrines of righteousness.

All propaganda has to be popular and has to accommodate itself to the comprehension of the least intelligent of those whom it seeks to reach.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

What we need is not more learning, not more eloquence, not more persuasion, not more organization, but more power from the Holy Spirit.

Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed.

There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

No saint, no pope, no general, no sultan, has ever had the power that a filmmaker has; the power to talk to hundreds of millions of people for two hours in the dark.

Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.

Oratory is the power of beating down your adversary's arguments and putting better in their place.