Manipulative Leadership Quotes

Don’t win loyalty, just obedience, and only while the lash is in the room.

The easiest way to establish a dictatorship is to claim you are God's representative on earth.

The greater a man's talents, the greater his power to lead astray.

Poor leaders motivate those following them with false promises of promotions, success, and a great tomorrow but rarely deliver on those promises. Leaders who do this can be manipulative and often hold the goals and aspirations of their followers hostage in order to get them to comply.

For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader, someone bold and unscrupulous who curries favor with the people by giving them other men's property. To such a man the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.

The Roman republic was indeed never finished. For the caprice of the multitude was left to operate at random. So that every popular demagogue had it in his power to spirit up the multitude to whatever pitch of madness might suit his ambitious, or interested views

All it takes to get elected in twenty-first-century America is a mob of frightened sheep and a wolf with a nice smile.

A legislator must know how to take advantage of even the defects of those he wants to govern. The art consists in making others work rather than in wearing oneself out.

Autocratic governments are masters of self-contradiction. They say one thing, do another.

From this arises the question whether 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 was self-serving politicians who convinced recent generations of Americans that we could all stand in a circle with our hands in each other’s pockets and somehow get rich.

More than anyone else, Adolf Hitler completely understood the union between government propaganda and between - and advertising, that they were in some ways the same thing.

He was the only man I ever knew who could get money from the rich and votes from the poor with the promise to protect them from each other.

One day old Thrashbarg said that Almighty Bob had declared that he, Thrashbarg, was to have first pick of the sandwiches. The villagers asked him when this had happened, exactly, and Thrashbarg said it had happened yesterday, when they weren't looking. 'Have faith,' Old Thrashbarg said, 'or burn!' They let him have first pick of the sandwiches. It seemed easiest.

Being consistent meant not departing from convictions already formulated; being a leader meant making other persons accept these convictions. It was a narrow track, and a one-way, but a person might travel a considerable distance on it. A number of dictators have.

In the 16th century, [Niccolò] Machiavelli - in an attempt to get back in the good graces of the powerful - wrote a slim volume called The Prince. In that book he showed the powers that be how to control the people. That book is a statement: separate and rule, divide and conquer. That's five hundred years ago and it still works, because we allow ourselves to be lead around with holes through our noses.

I don't need a director who's 'good with actors.'...A master manipulator is heaven.

I think that Donald Trump picked on people's fears, their anxieties and he gave them somebody to blame, and some folks just really turned out for him for that.

You have to be a demagogue on a lot of little things if you want to be around to have your way on the big things.

The selfish leader will attempt to lead others for their own gain and for the detriment of others.

We have become a nation ruled by fear. Since the end of the Second World War, various political leaders have fostered fear in the American people--fear of communism, fear of terrorism, fear of immigrants, fear of people based on race and religion, fear of gays and lesbians in love who just want to get married and fear of people who are somehow different. It is fear that allows political leaders to manipulate us all and distort our national priorities.

The bad leaders are the ones that push hard so they can gain, who brow beat us so that they can receive the benefit of our hard work, not so we can enjoy the success

And the propensity of weak and empty people to follow a leader into the darkness from which there is no return is still flourishing, as ever.

If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.

Without communism ... our state lacks a Wizard of Oz to terrify all the people all the time. So the state looks inward, at the true enemy, who turns out to be - who else? the people of the United States.