Quotes About Persuasion

Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come in to the mind of others.

I always thought Jon Stewart was an extremely good surgeon with his scalpel. He would have Republicans on who, I guess, were unclear about what Stewart was up to, and while Jon Stewart was being nice, he was building a case for drowning them.

Whilst our Hearts are violently set upon any thing, there is no convincing us that we shall ever be of another Mind.

Americans are big boys. You can talk them into almost anything. Just sit with them for half an hour over a bottle of whiskey and be a nice guy.

Some people will believe anything if you whisper it to them.

I have three tools at my disposal - my whistle, my body language and my talk. It is a question of how I marry them up to try to get the players around to my way of thinking.

As an attorney, I could be rather flamboyant in court. I did not act as though I were a black man in a white man's court, but as if everyone else - white and black - was a guest in my court. When trying a case, I often made sweeping gestures and used high-flown language.

Politicians talk themselves red, white, and blue in the face.

Cheney was among the best secretaries of defence the country has ever had. He was a very effective White House chief of staff. He did not make many enemies, and he had the ability to persuade people with that soft tone and very reasonable style of his. He's always been exceptionally good as the right-hand man.

If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven - from their sadness to their hope.

The ability to convince people of the wackiest notions - and both parties can do it - it's part of the dumbing down of America that's really highly problematic.

Agatha Christie holds special personal memories for me because my mum, a television producer called Pat Sandys, had been the first person to persaude the Agatha Christie estate to put one of her stories on T.V.

Producing small films, you usually have four or five people you want, and you hope one of them will say they'll do it.

The only way to advertise is by not focusing on the product.

Basically, you're selling a world as an actor, right? I mean it's like any sales person: if you believe in your product, you know your product, you sell it a lot better.

The greatest thing to be achieved in advertising, in my opinion, is believability, and nothing is more believable than the product itself.

Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.

I really like knowing secrets, and once I do know that secret, I can keep it. But if I'm on the outside and I don't know the secret, that's a different story. I will try with all my power to get the secret out of the person who knows.

Selling and telling are two different things. In politics, we sell ideas.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

We need a new model: If you can't explain it, you can't sell it.

If you are explaining, you are losing.

The more facts one introduces, the more truth one shows, the more determined the bigot is to cling to his belief.