Opinion Manipulation Quotes

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.

Point of view changes so much as time goes on. And it's important to acknowledge that the truth is multifaceted. And yet that conversation has a very different meaning now because of this whole alternative facts thing, calling everything you don't like "fake news."

As the master politician navigates the ship of state, he both creates and responds to public opinion. Adept at tacking with the wind, he also succeeds, at times, in generating breezes of his own.

Let’s not forget that expert opinion is for sale.

There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion.

The world is ruled by force, not by opinion; but opinion uses force.

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects... totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

there is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.

In the United States, the majority undertakes to supply a multitude of ready-made opinions for the use of individuals, who are thus relieved from the necessity of forming opinions of their own.

I think Russell Brand's books should be criticised for being rubbish - but it is true that there's a professional class of opinion-former who has a financial interest in their job not being taken away.

There's two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Even the financial disclosure statements that political bloggers were required to post hadn't stemmed the suspicion that people's opinions weren't really their own. "Who's paying you?" was a retort that might follow any bout of enthusiasm, along with laughter - who would let themselves be bought?

I don't like it when people spout about the popular opinion just to make it louder.

[We are] no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.

Polls move money as much as money moves polls.

The growing influence of focus groups means we are all in danger of being excessively cowed by their feedback.

Conventional opinions fit so comfortably into the dominant paradigm as to be seen not as opinions but as statements of fact, as 'the nature of things.' The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us.

There is nothing sooner overthrows a weak head than opinion by authority, like too strong a liquor for a frail glass.

We should call editorials what they are: columns written by committees.

Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to publick opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem the true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong the right.

Also, there are authors and publicists using the Internet to manipulate opinion, both positively for a work and negatively against the competition. I don't do this and can't stomach it, honestly.

Im a soulless lawyer. Give me any opinion and I can argue it.

You can drive yourself crazy and tie yourself in knots trying to anticipate what someone's going to like or not like, and doing test screenings and opinion polls. But pay too much mind to that, and you'll wind up with a big pile of mush.