Octavio Paz Quotes

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.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

I invented the low blow. I can outdemagogue the best of demagogues.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

I find revealing the secrets of magic quite reprehensible.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

Many criminals believe what they say is true; they could pass a lie detector test.

Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

What the eyes see and the ears hear, the mind believes.

There is a demand in these days for men who can make wrong appear right.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

Campaigns exaggerate or oversimplify the truth because it’s effective.

The most effective way to gather intelligence and thwart terrorism can also be a direct route into morally repugnant terrain. A survey of the landscape of persuasion.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

In politics where immediate success is attained by saying what people can be made to believe, rather than what is demonstrably true, accent is generally placed on the desirable rather than on the possible.

The reality often times does not match the rhetoric. The rhetoric is very easy if you keep the reality secret.

What most men call their conscience is imaginary virtue switching left or right according to self-interest.

We're able to use certain techniques to get people to behave in certain ways. We're able to use certain techniques to make it look like we're reading minds, even though we're not.

If you assume away most or all of the questions or difficulties, you can persuade yourself of just about anything.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

The power of propaganda is to say something enough times that it becomes the Big Lie.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.