Quotes About Persuasion

It's always a good feeling when you can produce just the right one-liner to prove your point so tidily.

Don't feel bad; I regularly reduce people to unintelligible stammers.

And humans will accept any story, however outlandish, when there's something in it for them. Preferably something green that folds.

You'd have a better chance persuading someone to change their sexual orientation than reaching people who have rendered themselves so deaf and blind.

If someone, says Epictetus, refuses to accept what is patently obvious, it is not easy to find arguments to use against him that could cause him to change his mind.

If a man, said Epictetus, opposes evident truths, it is not easy to find arguments by which we shall make him change his opinion. But this does not arise either from the man's strength or the teacher's weakness; for when the man, though he has been confuted, is hardened like a stone, how shall we then be able to deal with him by argument?

has any of you such power as Socrates had, in all his intercourse with men, of winning them over to his own convictions?

Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda.

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope.

The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

when a lie is repeated enough it becomes the truth!

What deters is not the capabilities and intentions we have, but the capabilities and intentions the enemy thinks we have. The central objective of a deterrent weapons system is, thus, psychological. The mission is persuasion.

Un homme certain, c'est un homme armé. Un homme certain que l'on contredit, c'est dans l'instant un assassin. Il tue le doute. Sa persuasion lui donne le pouvoir de nier sans débat ni regret. Il pense avec un lance-flamme. Il affirme au canon.

I told him a story, Calista. People will follow you anywhere if you tell them a tale they desperately want to believe. It's astonishing, really, how gullible even the most skeptical person can be if he or she wants to believe.

Any man who sought to seduce her would first have to win her trust and respect. Afterward he would very likely discover that he was the one who had been seduced.

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

J'ai lu dernièrement ce témoignage d'un ambassadeur israélien sur sa carrière dans les années cinquante et soixante : "Notre mission était délicate, parce qu'il nous fallait à la fois persuader les Arabes qu'Israël était invincible, et persuader l'Occident qu'Israël était en danger de mort.

Charientism (n.) A rhetorical term to describe saying a disagreeable thing in an agreeable way. If I knew how to say disagreeable things in an agreeable fashion I most likely would not be spending most of my time siting alone in a room, reading the dictionary.

Foreplead (v.) To ask too much in pleading. You are pleading when you ask for your job back; you are forepleading when you ask for a raise to go with it. Fornale

Mr. Friedman will convince you about anything he want, even if that's ridiculous. he was a really smart economist

Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe.

Within every one of us, there lives both a Don Quixote and a Sancho Panza to whom we hearken by turns; and though Sancho most persuades us, it is Don Quixote that we find ourselves obliged to admire.

But does one not, when coming out of an Italian film, feel better, an urge to change the order of things, preferably by persuading people, at least those who can be persuaded, whom only blindness, prejudice, or ill-fortune had led to harm their fellow men?