Bryan Fuller Quotes

I'm not trying to twist people's heads around. I'm not trying to say, "Believe in me."

There should be a name for this, for the process whereby one knows one is being yanked and concedes it has been done successfully - that one is grateful to have been spun. In the theater, it is called the willing suspension of disbelief. That's what allows the play to make an impact on the audience: they have to be able to make believe that what's happening on the stage is really happening. Maybe to a degree it is a requirement for all political participation, all effective political communication, too.

Slobodan Milosevic was just as smart as a five-year-old. Five-year-olds have an uncanny way of getting into your psyche, your self-esteem.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Making use of human weaknesses in intelligence work is a logical matter. It keeps coming up, and of course you try to look at all the aspects that interest you in a human being.

In psychology, trying to force others to accept the reality of a fake world is called gaslighting. It got its name from the 1944 film 'Gaslight,' in which a husband convinces his wife and their neighbors that she is insane.

The Wizard's First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation almost anyone will believe almost anything.

Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that Fat was totally insane.

The thing about people who are truly and malignantly crazy: their real genius is for making the people around them think they themselves are crazy. In military science this is called Psy-Ops, for your info.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next. Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you. Remember that, Sansa, when you come to play the game.” “What . . . what game?” “The only game. The game of thrones.” -(Littlefinger)

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

...counselling man to treat her as a slave while persuading her that she is a queen.

Anyone would be able to be played by someone like him [Donald Trump], that's what he did, he played people.

You must remember, my dear lady, the most important rule of any successful illusion: First, the people must want to believe in it.

Wars are often waged not because of what we believe, but because of the things we want others to believe.

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The greater the lie, the greater chance that it will be believed. All epoch-making events have been produced not by the written, but the spoken word.

Am I Machiavellian? I don't think I'm quite the mastermind people would have me be. Everything I do tends to be very successful and it may have something to do with the fact that I'm very good, not necessarily that I manipulate. But that doesn't often occur to people.

Women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of iron.

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.

Lose no time to contradict her, Nor endeavor to convict her; Only take this rule along, Always to advise her wrong, And reprove her when she's right; She may then grow wise for spite.

I believe in low lights and trick mirrors.

He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity.

Donald Trump doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren't, and that's one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama's birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality.