Diane Setterfield Quotes

I never failed to convince an audience that the best thing they could do was to go away.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

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.

Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

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

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

All politicians are to some extent salesmen.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Only lawyers and painters can turn white to black.

If a politician, during a campaign, finds it necessary to resort to flattery, he should spread it on, not in thin layers, but with a trowel, or better yet, a shovel.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

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.

Don't talk to me of your Archimedes' lever. He was an absentminded person with a mathematical imagination. Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines. Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.

The Politician uses the language of diplomacy of which he is a master, and it consists in telling some of the truth without necessarily exhausting it.

Nothing is so difficult to believe that oratory cannot make it acceptable …

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

The king is so subtle with his words that he would confound the apostolic religion itself. He will find the weak points of the pope's character and will trip him up to his destruction.

It's amazing how people believe you if you use long words.

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.

An orator of past times declared that his calling was to make small things appear to be grand.

There is no necessity for the man who means to be an orator to understand what is really just but only what would appear so to the majority of those who will give judgment; and not what is really good or beautiful but whatever will appear so; because persuasion comes from that and not from the truth.

Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write