Emotional Manipulation Quotes

Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment.

If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.

Don't wait for the good woman. She doesn't exist. There are women who can make you feel more with their bodies and their souls but these are the exact women who will turn the knife into you right in front of the crowd.

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.

It is better to be loved rather than feared, or feared rather than loved? It might perhaps be answered that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.

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

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it.

A lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth.

I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.

Loyalty, Signor Molteni, not love. Penelope is loyal to Ulysses but we do not know how far she loved him...and as you know people can sometimes be absolutely loyal without loving. In certain cases, in fact, loyalty is form of vengeance, of black-mail, of recovering one's self-respect. Loyalty, not love.

We shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so that they will vote for you or scaring people to date so that we can create a terror-industrial complex.

Nostalgia is a seductive liar.

We all resort to the ad hominem from time to time: in human affairs, it is difficult to avoid it, and probably not desirable. After all, our opponents are human. The proper use of an ad hominem argument, however, still requires evidence to back it up.

They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

A heart can no more be forced to love than a stomach can be forced to digest food by persuasion.

Rationalization is a cover-up, a process of providing one's emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications - in order to hide one's motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself. The price of rationalizing is the hampering, the distortion, and, ultimately, the destruction of one's cognitive faculty. Rationalization is a process not of perceiving reality, but of attempting to make reality fit one's emotions.

People should either be caressed or crushed. If you do them minor damage they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do. If you need to injure someone, do it in such a way that you do not have to fear their vengeance.

But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.

Love, love, love - all the wretched cant of it, masking egotism, lust, masochism, fantasy under a mythology of sentimental postures.

Mountains of gold would not seduce some men, yet flattery would break them down.

You never win an argument until they attack your person.

Language and words for psychopaths are only word deep; there is no emotional colouring behind it. A psychopath can use a word like, 'I love you' but it means nothing more to him than if he said, 'I'll have a cup of coffee.'