Quotes About Persuasion

What if we have become virtually addicted to the heightened sensory stimulation that composes much of our daily lives and cannot stop ourselves from pursuing it incessantly, as Judith Shulevitz suggests in6 The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time and as technology experts in "persuasion design" principles know very well?

No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own influence.

Art seduces, but does not exploit.

While an impactful presentation will catch a person's attention, an influential presentation will change a persons thinking.

The ultimate speech for the situation is your word (as the speaker), delivered through their word.

A mind unconvinced is a mind closed.

Speaking in public is a constant process of working for the attention of your audience.

It was a decision she would not regret, performing well enough right out of the gate that no further persuasion was required to convince Jamie to drop other sports and focus exclusively on running for the next three years.

I was able to work out that what humans may have lacked in physical attractiveness, they made up for in gullibility. You could tell them anything in a convincing-enough voice and they would believe it. Anything, of course, except the truth.

Say as little as possible, hope some of the undecideds like your teeth better than the other guy's—that's usually the way this business works.

He rang'd his tropes, and preach'd up patience;Back'd his opinion with quotations.

No nation permits herself to be coerced to the one crime that man cannot pardon. It is of her own accord that she hastens towards it; her chief has no need to persuade, it is she who urges him on.

She had been in situations like this, where people said, Convince me, and in none of those had they actually wanted to be convinced. She could lay down a perfect argument and they just invented new bullshit on the spot to justify why the answer was still no. When people said, Convince me, she knew it didn't mean they had an open mind. It meant they had power and wanted to enjoy it a minute.

The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.

Since the days of Bluebeard the Best way of getting a man to do a thing is to tell him not to do it

Fear sells.

We can't just say, "This pen is great, and consumers should buy it!" We ought to wrap up this message and create not only a convincing, but an interesting story around it. Here I am, improvising on the spot: A lady dropped her pen in the street, it was raining heavily, and a gentleman picked it up and said, "May I have your number?"

The important thing for you to remember is that it does not matter in the least how you got the idea or where it came from. You may never have met a professional hypnotist. You may never have been formally hypnotized. But if you have accepted an idea - from yourself, your teachers, your parents, friends, advertisements, from any other source - and further, if you are firmly convinced that idea is true, it has the same power over you as the hypnotist's words have over the hypnotized subject.

It is no exaggeration to say that every human being is hypnotized to some extent, either by ideas he has uncritically accepted from others, or ideas he has repeated to himself or convinced himself are true.

Faith was one of those people. Greer had started to see, who was seductive to almost everyone. Seduction was a power move to Faith, and maybe even a compulsion, but it seemed to happen effortlessly, and was in the service of a greater good.

Two people, tightly twined, can begin to convince themselves of anything. There's reality and then there's the shared experience, which feels so much more real. Two people, needing each other, can come to believe things. Can come to believe wanting something was the same as making it happen. That it wasn't a choice, in the end, but the right thing to do, the fulfillment of some deeper calling.

The only truth was whatever you could make someone believe.

Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.

Sometimes, if you want to change a man's mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.