Quotes about manipulation

Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.

Danny was a bottomless pit. He wanted other people to fill him, only in the process the other people ended up drained.

"Do not be deceived by the way men of bad faith misuse words and names," the Black Pope was saying, and now his head was quite powdered with snow. "It used to be only the English who excelled in the deception of words. Then the French went even beyond them, and now the whole world is adept at it."

You have to ration your opponents' victories. You have to mete them out, slowly and meanly. You have to make your opponents subliminally grateful for every little bit of compliance. That way you get away with giving up ten small losses a day, rather than ten big ones.

What people believed often turned out to be true just because they believed it. Charlatans and mages were quick to take advantage of that.

If you call a thing by a name that doesn't seem so repellent, then the thing itself also becomes less repellent. Sympathetic magic—except it wasn't sympathetic to those who fell victim to it.

Mirrors reflecting into other mirrors reflecting into other mirrors yet…Intelligence was that kind of game, a chess match with both players moving at the same time and both of them blindfolded more often than not.

That wasn’t even close to fair, and Sylvia knew it. But she’s already seen that political campaigns weren’t designed to be fair. They were designed to convince, by whatever means possible.

I tell myself I talked to Friday to educate him out of darkness and silence. But is that the truth? There are times when benevolence deserts me and I use words only as the shortest way to subject him to my will.

“Handling surplus population is a perpetual challenge,” said Onsofruct. “Has it not been written that the poor are always with us?”

Questioner shook her head. “Handling surplus men isn’t that difficult. Just start a lively war or find some new frontier—there’s always dangerous work that needs doing. If that fails, one can create lethal rites of passage to kill off batches at a time. One needn’t pretend, not with men. The gang chief or general simply talks them into a fury and sends them into battle, and then gives them a medal after they’re maimed or dead. Or, the employer gets them to use up their lives in a factory and then tosses them aside with a memento and an inadequate pension. Team spirit does the rest.”

Though he was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors and demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance.

Even when people are well-meaning, do not let them fool with your heads.