Covert Persuasion Quotes

This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.

Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda texts leads ultimately to less conviction and participation. The listeners critical powers decrease if the propaganda message is more rational and less violent.

One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success.

Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it.

A principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.

Like propaganda generally, advertising must thus pervade the atmosphere; for it wants, paradoxically, to startle its beholders without really being noticed by them. Its aim is to jolt us, not "into thinking," as in a Brechtian formulation, but specifically away from thought, into quasiautomatic action: "To us," as an executive at Coca-Cola puts it, "communication is message assimilation--the respondent must be shown to behave in some way that proves they [sic] have come to accept the message, not merely to have received it.

It's easy to become a satellite today without even being aware of it. This country can seduce God. Yes, it has that seductive power; the power of the dollar.

I printed a list of Irish names from the Internet and my husband, Dave, saw Finley on the list. I really liked it but didn't want to scare Dave off with my enthusiasm. So I used a little reverse psychology and let him think it was his idea.

In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.

There are two parts to influence: First, influence is powerful; and second, influence is subtle. You wouldn't let someone push you off course, but you might let someone nudge you off course and not even realize it.

It is very depressing to see that in the 21st century people are still using the same 1950s and '60s style of propaganda.

You have big names in Scientology running around pretending to be the nicest people, and they take the care to talk to you and look at you in the eye, but that's all part of the process. That's all part of being in the church - to be a good example, to ingratiate yourself to Hollywood so that they'll say, "Hey, I don't know why you're attacking Scientology." It's all purposeful. I did it, I know!

The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.

Not that I'm against sneaking some notions into people's heads upon occasion. (Or blasting them in outright.