Persuasion Quotes

“Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician.”

“These, Gentlemen, are the opinions upon which I base my facts.”

“You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone.”

“Amplification is the vice of modern oratory. It is an insult to an assembly of reasonable men, disgusting and revolting instead ofpersuading. Speeches measured by the hour, die by the hour.”

“The public school system: "Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." - Walter Karp, Editor Harper's MagazineThe ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”

“If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.”

“Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.”

“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.”

“People's minds are changed through observation and not through argument.”

“Every man has a commission to admonish, exhort, convince another of error.”

“With those who wish to think amiss of me, I have learnt to be perfectly indifferent: but where I know a mind to be ingenuous, andto need only truth to set it to rights, I cannot be as passive.”

“rhetoric is will doing the work of imagination.”

“One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.”

“Give me a few minutes to talk away my face and I can seduce the Queen of France.”

“When two people meet, as long as there is any form of rapport maintained, the person with the most certainty will eventually influence ther other person.”

“I never saw an instance of one or two disputants convincing the other by argument.”

“It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.”

“An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.”

“If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.”

“The road to the heart is the ear”

“A man in the wrong may more easily be convinced than one half right.”

“Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it.”

“Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of theothers. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.”

“It is as useless to argue with those who have renounced the use of reason as to administer medication to the dead.”

“A good symbol is the best argument, and is a missionary to persuade thousands.”