Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Quotes

People who want to manipulate you will fear your joy, because it's not easily controlled.

It's easier to control people when they're afraid.

Pleasure can be used to enslave a people just as effectively as pain.

Decent people are so easy to manipulate, Potter.

Honestly, it’s so easy to get what you want from people if they think you’re a psycho.

Propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man - the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

Using a fetching face to make men do as you wish is no different from a man using muscle to force a woman to his will. Both are base, and both will fail a person as they age.

Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.

Nobody can be kinder than the narcissist while you react to life in his own terms.

A sociopath is not just someone who doesn't care about human emotion. They're someone who understands people to the point that they can manipulate them to an extraordinary degree.

Men. They were all so incredibly easy to sway. Pat them on their heads, give them something to eat, and they'll follow you anywhere. Add a smile and a few stupid compliments, and they'll immediately forget all about their other responsibilities.

Cults make people sing so hard for so long - because it over-oxygenates the blood and sets them up to faint.

Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals for the most part governed by the impulse of passion. This is a truth well understood by our adversaries who have practised upon it with no small benefit to their cause. For at the very moment they are eulogizing the reason of men & professing to appeal only to that faculty, they are courting the strongest & most active passion of the human heart - VANITY!

I don't want to just mess with your head. I want to mess with your life.... I want you to miss appointments, burn dinner, skip your homework. I want you to tell your wife to take that moonlight stroll on the beach at Waikiki with the resort tennis pro while you read a few more chapters.

Treat 'em like a prostitute, don't treat 'em well until your sure of the scoop.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

Influencing people is dangerous. Their acts and thoughts become your illegitimate children. You can't get away from them and Heaven knows what they mayn't grow up into.

If a man knows precisely what he can do to you or what epithet he can hurl against you in order to make you lose your temper, your equilibrium, then he can always keep you under subjection.

My mother could make anybody feel guilty - she used to get letters of apology from people she didn't even know.

If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!

I think there are two ways in which people are controlled - first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them.

I succeeded in using my charms like a weapon; I learned to play with other's hearts and to master my own desires.

People only respond to fear.

I'm told I'm very charming when people do what I want.

Some people give gifts in order to bewilder, confuse, and manipulate their recipients.