Persuasion Quotes

The question is the propriety of how we go about influencing and changing behavior.

I have a talent for dealing with difficult men.

You might just as well read the Bible to a herd of buffaloes as to those fellows ... but they have a supreme respect for the logic ... embodied in Sharp's rifles .

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

Those convinced against their will are of the same opinion still.

To be persuasive we must be believable. To be believable, we must be truthful.

Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel. It is to bring another out of his bad sense into your good sense.

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one.

It often happens that, if a lie be believed only for an hour, it has done its work, and there is no further occasion for it.

Without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain.

I know that one is able to win people far more by the spoken that by the written word, and that every great movement on this globe owes its rise to the great speakers and not to the great writers.

… the thug is aware that loudness convinces 60 persons where reasoning convinces but one..

If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything.

Most great leaders are also great communicators. Great leaders have learned how to persuade so their objectives can be reached. The most powerful device to persuade is story. Stating facts and figures is not memorable. Emotionally connecting your audience to your idea through story will move them.

Diplomacy is the art of letting somebody else have your way.

It is never to be expected in a revolution that every man is to change his opinion at the same moment. There never yet was any truth or any principle so irresistibly obvious that all men believed it at once. Time and reason must cooperate with each other to the final establishment of any principle; and therefore those who may happen to be first convinced have not a right to persecute others, on whom conviction operates more slowly. The moral principle of revolutions is to instruct, not to destroy.

If I get ‘em by the short and curlies, the hearts and minds will follow.

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

For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't believe, no proof is possible.

Propaganda is that branch of lying which often deceives your friends without ever deceiving your enemies.

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion… Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them…he must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.