Quotes about Persuasion

There is no reason in principle why the question, what precisely happened at Easter, cannot be raised by any historian of any persuasion. Even if some Christians might wish to rule it off limits, they have (presumably) no a priori right to tell other historians, whether Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, gnostics, agnostics, or anyone else, what they may and may not study.

Unless a person can give reasons, there is, literally, no reason why anyone else should take that person seriously. But without reasons, all we are left with is emotional blackmail. We sometimes call it 'moral blackmail,' but it has nothing to do with morals, only with the implied juvenile threat of having a tantrum unless everyone else gives in.

Tell someone to do something, and you change their life—for a day; tell someone a story and you change their life.

But if there had been an earlier "victory," when did it take place? Matthew, Mark, and Luke all supply the answer: at the beginning of Jesus's public career, during his forty-day fast in the desert, when the satan tried to distract him, to persuade him to grasp the right goal by the wrong means, and so to bring him over to his side (Matt. 4:1—11; Mark 1:12—13; Luke 4:1—13).

This means we can already rule out the revisionist positions on Jesus's resurrection that have been offered by so many writers in recent years. Many suggest that the early disciples were so overwhelmed with grief at Jesus's death that they picked up the idea of resurrection from their surrounding culture and clung to it, persuading themselves that Jesus had been raised from the dead, though of course they knew he hadn't been.

That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us ("vote for us and things will get better!") have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we're never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment.

Put bluntly, abortion supporters have lost the argument on the scientific level.

To get a message across to people, you must address their assumptions, questions, objections, hopes, fears, and aspirations.

There is a time for stories, and there is a time for rational arguments, and the skill we need lies in knowing which to use, and when. Put

Creative persuasion is a matter of being biblical, not of being either modern or postmodern.

It is no great feat to burn a little man. It is a great achievement to persuade him. ERASMUS, LETTER

There are no foolproof methods of persuasion, and those that come closest are coercive and dangerous because they override the will rather than convince the mind.