Quotes about manipulation

“We should be frank with each other,” Lavelan said.

It had been my experience that most conversations that were launched on such a declaration represented an attempt by the initiator to gain far more information than he intended to give.

When we undertake to deceive others intentionally, we communicate messages meant to mislead them, meant to make them believe what we ourselves do not believe. We can do so through gesture, through disguise, by means of action or inaction, even through silence.

I already knew that Max’s type of messianic enterprise is a gold mine. The legions of the lonely, the mentally and emotionally starved, the bewildered and resentful, the angry daydreamers—who of them wouldn’t chip in five or ten dollars to buy a substitute for God, or Mom, or Big Brother, or the New Jerusalem?

When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, “No, you don’t, I agree, it’s just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it’s quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.”

His voice had a hypnotic quality, which lulled one into a kind of passive daze. One ended with the impression that one had had a wonderful revelation but without remembering much of what the Master had actually said. Some of his assertions seem to contradict what others had told me of his doctrines; but I understood that he brought out a new doctrine every month or two, keeping his suckers too confused to think.

The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent.

The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will.

"To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom."

It was the sort of overly complex plan dreamed up by armchair manipulators who thought they could play chess with the universe and didn’t realize that the universe ignored rulebooks.

The more he didn’t know, she reasoned, the easier he would be to fool.

'You can't drive a flock of sheep to market in a dead straight line, but there are ways of getting 'em there.'

In the old words of wisdom, you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, and that’s usually enough to get by.

“One who searches for the definition ‘devious’ can find it listed under ‘human.’”