Richard Hatch Quotes

There is no question that advertising is an art, and manipulation is the art of advertising through the medium of the tape.

It's so easy to manipulate an audience, but it's nearly always clear that you are being manipulated. I think even people that are not critically attuned are aware of cynical manipulation in film.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

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.

The number one rule of today's marketing – the key secret of those who seek to control your beliefs and habits in order to take your money, your votes, your time or whatever else it is they desire from you – is to always keep in mind that nobody really believes they can be manipulated.

The public is moved by mood more than logic, by instinct more than reason, and that is something that every politician must make use of or guard against

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

In psychology and behavioral economics, people have shown that if you just describe options in a certain way, or make some features of a situation salient, you can get people to do and even see what you want. You don't have to be a Jedi to manipulate people's attention.

Most car advertising assumes that people have IQs that are missing a digit.

We're able to use certain techniques to get people to behave in certain ways. We're able to use certain techniques to make it look like we're reading minds, even though we're not.

In a way, advertising, for all its shallowness, its love of design, its modishness and its self-justification, is curiously innocent. The idea of the hidden persuader or the manipulator is largely absurd.

I spent the majority of my adult life in a business where the object is to make people believe that you believe what you say. I was good at that, right?

In one form or another, conscious or unconscious, we have all become propagandists; integrity alone can keep us truthful.

I want to make it clear to people that the idea of putting subliminable messages into ads is ridiculous.

Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.

It is an old, old adage that if you want someone to do something, get them to believe it is their idea. Humanity is mind controlled and onlyslightly more conscious than your average zombie. Far fetched? No, no. I define mind control as the manipulation of someone's mind so that they think, and therefor act, the way you want them to.

As long as we respond predictably to what feels good and what feels bad, it is easy for others to exploit our preferences for their own ends.

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

Roughly speaking, any man with energy and enthusiasm ought to be able to bring at least a dozen others round to his opinion in the course of a year no matter how absurd that opinion might be. We see every day in politics, in business, in social life, large masses of people brought to embrace the most revolutionary ideas, sometimes within a few days. It is all a question of getting hold of them in the right way and working on their weak points.

Enchantment and seduction were fine means of persuasion, but when time is short, an awkward but quick concussion could better serve a girl's purpose.

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance.

Advertising works most effectively when it's in line with what people are already trying to do.

Every corner of the public psyche is canvassed by some of the most talented citizens to see if the desire for some merchandisable product can be cultivated.