Manipulation Quotes

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

Those who want to perpetuate apartheid also seek to divert your attention to the false issue of communism, to send the entire American public on a witch hunt.

I can't really put it in one sentence because although on one hand Preacher is about faith and yes it is also about, I suppose, the search for God, the search for faith and the manipulation and the abuse committed by figures in whom I suppose people have faith.

Whenever the law gets its hands on you, those who use the law to their own advantage will also turn it against you. Don't put your trust in the laws of men, Alvin. They were designed by strong men to improve their power over weaker ones.

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

FLATTERY is nothing, but false friendship, fawning hypocrisy, dishonest civility, base merchandise of words…

The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.

Socialists have infiltrated our schools, our law courts, our government, our MEDIA OF COMMUNICATIONS. ... the Socialist movement is made up of a relatively small number of people who have developed the TECHNIQUE OF INFLUENCING large masses of people to a VERY HIGH DEGREE

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

No matter how smart or well-educated you are, you can be deceived.

Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.

The weak in courage is strong in cunning.

It's true that people will take advantage of you in Nigeria, but this happens everywhere in the world.

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.

The heights of popularity and patriotism are still the beaten road to power and tyranny; flattery to treachery; standing armies to arbitrary government; and the glory of God to the temporal interest of the clergy.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.