Thomas Paine Quotes

It is true the orator may make a myriad replica of his own passion out of those who listen to him. But that does not prove he is right or they are not fools.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

Reason and truth have rarely prevailed against demagoguery when the audience is too ignorant to tell the difference.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

When you're appealing to people's fears and anxieties, you can make some gains.

The design of Rhetoric is to remove those Prejudices that lie in the way of Truth, to Reduce the Passions to the Government of Reasons; to place our Subject in a Right Light, and excite our Hearers to a due consideration of it.

When our opponents on the Left have no serious ideas of their own, they resort to emotional appeals that play up Americans' fears about the future.

An appeal to fear never finds an echo in German hearts.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

Part of the reason that the government's fear mongering is succeeding is because so many people are so ignorant, that it is easier for government to frighten people in submission.

When the news wants to tell you something is important, they put dramatic theme music behind it. They scare you into watching the story.

Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

People hate negative tactics, but the fact is, as the 3 A.M. ad demonstrates, they can be very effective.

We all resort to the ad hominem from time to time: in human affairs, it is difficult to avoid it, and probably not desirable. After all, our opponents are human. The proper use of an ad hominem argument, however, still requires evidence to back it up.

Facts are not liberals' strong suit. Rhetoric is.

I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.

Fratricide dominates our public debate, and America is held hostage with tactics of smear and fear.

It seems the only way to induce action in this country is through the creation of fear and hysteria.

The game of politics is to make you afraid so that you don’t think.

We shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so that they will vote for you or scaring people to date so that we can create a terror-industrial complex.

That's how we invaded Iraq, through the fear of an 'evil empire,' and it just makes people feel like bulls with the toreadors - you see red, and you charge.

It's really scary or it's easy to generate fear around an idea or around an -ism when you don't provide any substance to it.

You'd think we'd be exhausted by that rhetoric but you're still able to move people with fear and fright and lies that somebody's going to take your place, that in order for someone to rise, you have to fall.

I think Trump uses social media as a way to get to people's lowest common denominator. He uses it to incite fear. He talks about simplistic ideas.

The more I read about the rules the great orators used, the more I realised, of course, this is how you stir people's hearts, and you persuade and cajole and move people out of fixed positions. The techniques are quite menacingly easy.