Manipulative Language Quotes

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

Another way of verbally masking elite preemption of other people's decisions is to use the word 'ask'-as in 'We are just asking everyone to pay their fair share.' But of course governments do not ask, they: tell. The Internal Revenue Service does not 'ask' for contributions. It takes.

No matter what Hitler said, he spoke with a fine feeling for the particular circle which he addressed. ... He was a great psychologist.

Barack Obama isn't the first politician to break a promise, torture the truth or outright lie to the American people. But, he certainly is among the most accomplished at it.

[British Prime Minister William] Gladstone is a sophisticated rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination, that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign his opponents, and glorify himself.

Hitler showed the evil that could be done by the art of rhetoric. Churchill showed how it could help to save humanity.

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved

And what? What's the other choice? To passively let things happen and then say: "Tut-tut, what at botch that was"? Don't we all manipulate people? Even if we openly ask them to make a choice, don't we try to frame it so they'll chose as we think they should?

I'm always a bit suspicious of writers who have the gift of the gab.

And if, to be sure, sometimes you need to conceal a fact with words, do it in such a way that it does not become known, or, if it does become known, that you have a ready and quick defense.

Flattery is like wine, which exhilarates a man for a moment, but usually ends by going to his head and making him act foolishly.

Yellow journalism is defined by prominent headlines that screamed excitement, often about comparatively unimportant news; a lavish use of pictures, many of them without significance; faked interviews and stories; a Sunday supplement and color comics; and a more or less ostentatious sympathy with the 'underdog,' with campaigns against abuses suffered by the common people.

Beware of the conversationalist who adds "in other words." He is merely starting afresh.

She was a keen observer, a precise user of language, sharp-tongued and funny. She could stir your emotions. Yes, really, that's what she was so good at - stirring people's emotions, moving you. And she knew she had this power...I only realized later. At the time, I had no idea what she was doing to me.

Are we diminishing the bully pulpit to a pulpit of bull?

The contrived language and the flattering attitude rarely come with the virtue.

The honied tongue hath its poison.

Everyone is guilty at one time or another of throwing out questions that beg to be ignored, but mothers seem to have a market on the supply. "Do you want a spanking or do you want to go to bed?" Don't you want to save some of the pizza for your brother?" Wasn't there any change?

I listened to Hillary [Clinton], and I heard the double talk. She's so good at it, and I'm not making this up, that the Communist Chinese have sent their cadres to study her speeches. They say she's the finest propagandist they've ever heard.

Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.

The juggle of sophistry consists, for the most part, in using a word in one sense in all the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion.

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.