Quotes about Manipulation

Fear clouds our convictions and distorts our discernment. When we fill our minds with negative predictions or allow our thoughts to manipulate us into thinking about all the possible destructive outcomes of our mission, we invite fear to paralyze our progress.

Concerns about democracy's future are better directed elsewhere, John Paul argues, for if "there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power.

Terminological inexactitude

Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

Most people are manipulated by the approval of others, the paycheck that supports them, and the lifestyle that has handcuffed them to the brass ring of perceived success. On this path we eventually live like slaves to a man-made system. We chase the goals of others instead of pursuing our own dreams. We anesthetize our despair with the next purchase, pill, or plunder.

Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

The devil would gladly give a Bible to every man and promote obedience to its commands if in exchange we would surrender to him the Gospel

Find some disgruntled member, whisper a lie in his ear and he will wreak havoc in your church.

She knew that there were all kinds of ways to make a conquest and that one of the surest roads to a woman's genitals was through her sadness.

To make a contented slave,' [Frederick] Bailey later wrote, 'it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.' This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society.

Baloney is the lie laid on so thick you hate it. Blarney is flattery laid on so thin you love it.