Psychological Influence Quotes

Our big social institutions do not reflect human nature; they distort it.

He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity.

Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything - you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

Although every man in democracy thinks himself individually the equal of every other man, this makes it difficult to resist the collectivity of equal men. If all opinions are equal, then the majority of opinions, on the psychological analogy of politics, should hold sway.

Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince... the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.

People's lives are forever controlled by two emotions: fear and greed.

He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.

All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those towards whom it is directed will understand it. Therefore, the intellectual level of the propaganda must be lower the larger the number of people who are to be influenced by it.

When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy.

This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

we become the stories we tell ourselves

You become that which you think you are. Or, it is not that you become it, but that the idea gets very deeply rooted and that's what all conditioning is.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.

If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.

Brain-washing starts in the cradle.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses.

Everyone knows nowadays that people 'have complexes'. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.

If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.

An incentive is a bullet, a key: an often tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.