Manipulative Rhetoric Quotes

The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so they believe they are clever as he.

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

Reason and truth have rarely prevailed against demagoguery when the audience is too ignorant to tell the difference.

If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.

Propaganda's content increasingly resembles information. It has even clearly been proved that a violent, excessive, shock-provoking propaganda texts leads ultimately to less conviction and participation. The listeners critical powers decrease if the propaganda message is more rational and less violent.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

I think my main concern is because I worry about demagoguery. It's real. You see the people standing up there and applauding.

I think it's fair to say there is a demagogic path that Europeans, South Americans, Asians have pursued, and we know where that leads. It uses xenophobia, it uses paranoia, it uses prejudice, it uses nationalism to really stir people up and to, you know, begin an us-versus-them contrast, which is dangerous and is not something we've had in our politics at a presidential level in America.

Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.

Over time, the repetition, Donald Trump's lies about election rigging, have become a form of background noise, more of the same. And this is a propaganda technique, whether Trump knows it or not.

I will reveal to the American people over and over and over again the Clinton way, say what you have to say to get elected, lie as long as you can get away with it.

Words can be used for venal purposes. Words are incredible sources of propaganda and can cause terrible havoc.

I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are as slaves.

Demagogues are so easy to identify. They gesture a lot and speak with pulpit rhythms, using words that ring of religious fervour and god-fearing sincerity. Sincerity with nothing behind it takes so much practice. The practice can always be detected. Repetition. Great attempts to keep your attention on words.

The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits.

When an objection cannot be made formidable, there is some policy in trying to make it frightful; and to substitute the yell and the war-whoop, in the place of reason, argument and good order.

If you help manufacture an enemy that's really evil, you can point to the fact that it's really evil, and say, "Hey, it's really evil."

If we become a people who are willing to give up our money and our freedom in exchange for rhetoric and promises, then nothing can save us.

I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them--unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality.

The psychological peer pressure that the left has employed - and deployed, actually - on young people has been overwhelmingly successful. It has created droves and droves of people that vote against what they know is right, vote against their own self-interest, in exchange for feeling good about themselves and also being immune from criticism.

I think a lot of people vote in fear. People like Donald Trump are good at casting this shadow of fear over people, making them believe if they don't vote for him then the terrorists are going to get them or whatever. All his ways are to scare people to vote for him. It's so sad.

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy.

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.

Reason is poor propaganda when opposed by the yammering, unceasing lies of shrewd and evil and self-serving men.