Quotes About Persuasion

Charming people are only good at seducing innocent souls.

Money is like a beautiful lady or a handsome guy. Crushing. All you need is to master one skill of attraction and then everything will make sense.

People have mastered flattery to the point that it has become a new street language.

Philosophers who relied on rhetoric have become the sophists' best admirers.

The sin is not in the persuasion itself, but in the intention of that individual. If the intention is pure, then your means will also be justified.

Caesar's messengers didn't go round the world saying, 'Caesar is lord, so if you feel you need to have a Roman-empire kind of experience, you might want to submit to him'.

There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study.

Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it 'moral blackmail,' but it has nothing to do with morals, only with the implied juvenile threat of having a tantrum unless everyone else gives in.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life–for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us ("vote for us and things will get better!") have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment.

The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.

When was the last time you lost an argument?" He pretended to think about it. Then, leaning down, he whispered in her ear, "A few hours ago when you refused to stop the car and crawl into the backseat with me.

I'm coming home with you." "For how long?" He was keeping her. That was nonnegotiable. He just wanted to know how much persuasion it would take. Her hand rose to lie over his heartbeat. A tentative touch that made the cat snarl for more. "For always." It was the one answer he hadn't expected.

I seduce you into forgiving me.

Respect is one thing. being liked and respected, that's true power. People will do anything for you if they like you.

So there's a freeing up that happens when I can go into that storytelling mode...It isn't about how much sense you make, it is about how compelling you are. (interview)

Truely was a Mississippi boy still. He didn't have a thing against religion, especially in the gentle hands of somebody like his daddy--or his mother either. But he wasn't too much persuaded when salvation was fired out of a double-barrel shotgun aimed point-blank at his skull.

But I saved my breath. The likes of her isn't going to listen nor be changed in the mind just from hearing sense. Some people sense is wasted on and that's purely a fact.

The character of people varies, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion.

Slaves were a lure, dangled before poorer men in order to persuade them to put up their land as collateral.

Comedian Marty Feldman adds, "The pen is mightier than the sword, and considerably easier to write with.

Tomé não foi persuadido a olhar para dentro, para o seu coração, mas a avaliar provas no mundo externo. Ele, então, fez um compromisso com base em fatos relevantes, não por causa de uma ausência de fatos e certamente não contra eles.

To get a message across to people, you must address their assumptions, questions, objections, hopes, fears, and aspirations.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world