Jacques Ellul Quotes

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

When you say or do anything to please, get, keep, influence, or control anyone or anything, fear is the cause and pain is the result.

As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

Influencing people is dangerous. Their acts and thoughts become your illegitimate children. You can't get away from them and Heaven knows what they mayn't grow up into.

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

... motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,You take the human being and you twist it all aboutSo scrub my skin with womenChain my tongue with whiskyStuff my nose with garlicCoat my eyes with butterFill my ears with silverStick my legs in plasterTell me lies about Vietnam.

I'm told I'm very charming when people do what I want.

They try to make you think they care about what you do but they don't. They don't want you to act a certain way. So you're easy to understand. So you won't pose a threat to them.

If you want to control somebody, support them. Or marry them.

The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.

Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.

Every chick I try to intimidate in a different way. You have to think about their personality. You have to think about what would get under that particular person's skin the most.

This is the secret of propaganda: To totally saturate the person, whom the propaganda wants to lay hold of, with the ideas of the propaganda, without him even noticing that he is being saturated.

The fear tactic is a tactic that's used by people who want to maintain control, and it's very effective.

Anyone? On Snow's visit before the Victory Tour, he challenged me to erase any doubts of my love for Peeta. "Convince me," Snow said. It seems, under that hot pink sky with Peeta's life in limbo, I finally did. And In doing so, I gave him the weapon he needed to break me.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

Pleasure can be used to enslave a people just as effectively as pain.

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

Using a fetching face to make men do as you wish is no different from a man using muscle to force a woman to his will. Both are base, and both will fail a person as they age.

People only respond to fear.

The thoughts he put in her head. Someone should’ve arrested him for it.

Hate and love are essentially the same in that the person who loves is as easily manipulated as a person who hates