Verbal Manipulation Quotes

An Oxe is taken by the horns, and a Man by the tongue.

The "brightness" of the 15 percent might or might not indicate a profound feeling for the causes of things; it is largely verbal and symbol-manipulating, and is almost certainly partly an obsessional device not to know and touch risky matter, just as Freud long ago pointed out that the nagging questions of small children are a substitute for asking the forbidden questions.

Speech gave man a unique power to lead a double life, he could say one thing and do another.

At court one becomes a sort of human ant eater, and learns to catch one's prey by one's tongue.

To knot a sentence up properly, it has to be thought out carefully, and revised. New phrases have to be put in; sudden changes of subject must be introducted; verbs must be shifted to unsuspected localities; short words must be excised with ruthless hand; archaisms must be sprinkled like sugar-plums upon the concoction; the fatal human tendency to say things straightforwardly must be detected and defeated by adroit reversals; and, if a glimmer of meaning yet remain under close scrutiny, it must be removed by replacing all the principal verbs by paraphrases in some dead language.

I know how easy it is for one to stay well within moral, ethical, and legal bounds through the skillful use of words - and to thereby spin, sidestep, circumvent, or bend a truth completely out of shape. To that extent, we are all liars on numerous occasions.

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

Stop playing verbal games with me, madam, or I shall go out into that ballroom, find your mother, and bring her here

Unconsciously I had discovered the commentator's secret weapon-that so long as you can wield words, it isn't necessary to know what you're talking about.

Unfaithful to their meanings, words perturb our perturb our powers of reason ... the only safe words are our words.

You who speak languages, you are such liars.

For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.

A Yea might turn in to a Nae and vice versa if a sufficient quantity of wordage was applied. In other talk you argument out until you get the answer you want.

It is a good point of cunning for a man to shape the answer he would have in his own words and propositions, for it makes the other party stick the less.

I just love any kind of language that can change the energy in a room. There are no limits for me, as long as it feels like it's being used in a particular way to garner or elicit a very particular reaction, so that you can then use that reaction later for something else. But when it's gratuitous language or physical exposure, then I get a bit like, "Oh! Put it away!"