Best 183 quotes in «persuasion quotes» category

Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.

One of the best ways to persuade others is by listening to them.

Secrecy has many advantages, for when you tell someone the purpose of any object right away, they often think there is nothing to it.

The real persuaders are our appetites, our fears and above all our vanity. The skillful propagandist stirs and coaches these internal persuaders.

There is arguably something wrong with a method of persuasion that cannot pass the test of publicity.

There is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood bu those who hear it.

The triumph of persuasion over force is the sign of a civilized society.

Ninety percent of selling is conviction and 10 percent is persuasion.

Our Constitution recognises no other power than that of persuasion, for enforcing religious observances.

Social and cultural change, however desirable, should not be effected by the engines of national power. Let us, through persuasion and education, seek to improve institutions we deem defective. But let us, in doing so, respect the orderly processes of the law. Any other course enthrones tyrants and dooms freedom.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

There are good leaders who actively guide and bad leaders who actively misguide. Hence, leadership is about persuasion, presentation and people skills.

There are lives lived for love, and lives lived for art. We, happy band, have chosen the later persuasion.

The talent of insinuation is more useful than that of persuasion, as everybody is open to insinuation, but scarce any to persuasion.

The use of violence as an instrument of persuasion is therefore inviting and seems to the discontented to be the only effective protest.

To please people is a great step towards persuading them.

Too much zeal offends where indirection works.

The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression.

Where visionaries can be good at persuasion, CEOs are good at wielding authority. Visionaries transcend organizations, resources, and current realities, while CEOs master them.

Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.

Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation.

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.

ADAMANT, n. A mineral frequently found beneath a corset. Soluble in solicitate of gold.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

A candidate with no experience they would package as a citizen politician, a lifetime hack as an elder statesman.

A dog is one of the few remaining reasons why some people can be persuaded to go for a walk.

Your lips are my persuasion, your love will be my cure.

A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.

Again, it is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs. And if it be objected that one who uses such power of speech unjustly might do great harm, that is a charge which may be made in common against all good things except virtue, and above all against the things that are most useful, as strength, health, wealth, generalship. A man can confer the greatest of benefits by a right use of these, and inflict the greatest of injuries by using them wrongly.

A laconic Texas lawmaker declined to use his considerable influence to intervene in a loud dispute between his colleagues. When asked why not, he said, "They're not voting. If they're not voting, they're not passing any laws. If they're not passing any laws, they're not hurting anybody.

All great people had critics but they still believe in the beauty of their dreams, fully persuaded to stay focused and determined for the realisation of their dreams.

Are you persuaded of what you do or not? Do you need something to happen or not in order to do what you do? Do you need the correlations to coincide always, because the end is never in what you do, even if what you do is vast and distant but is always in your continuation? Do you say you are persuaded of what you do, no matter what? Yes? Then I tell you: tomorrow you will certainly be dead. It doesn't matter? Are you thinking about fame? About your family? But your memory dies with you,with you your family is dead. Are you thinking about your ideals? You want to make a will? You want a headstone? But tomorrow those too are dead, dead. All men die with you. Your death is an unwavering comet. Do you turn to god? There is no god, god dies with you. The kingdom of heaven crumbles with you, tomorrow you are dead, dead. Tomorrow everything is finished—your body, family, friends, country, what you’re doing now, what you might do in the future, the good, the bad, the true, the false, your ideas, your little part, god and his kingdom, paradise, hell, everything, everything, everything. Tomorrow everything is over—in twenty four hours is death. Well, then the god of today is no longer yesterday’s, no longer the country, the good, the bad, friends, or family. You want to eat? No, you cannot. The taste of food is no longer the same; honey is bitter, milk is sour, meat nauseating, and the odor, the odor sickens you: it reeks of the dead. You want a woman to comfort you in your last moments? No, worse: it is dead flesh. You want to enjoy the sun, air, light, sky? Enjoy?! The sun is a rotten orange, the light extinguished, the air suffocating. The sky is a low, oppressive arc. . . .No, everything is closed and dark now. But the sun shines, the air is pure, everything is like before, and yet you speak like a man buried alive, describing his tomb. And persuasion? You are not even persuaded of the sunlight; you cannot move a finger, cannot remain standing. The god who kept you standing,made your day clear and your food sweet, gave you family, country, paradise—he betrays you now and abandons you because the thread of your philopsychia is broken. The meaning of things, the taste of the world, is only for continuation’s sake. Being born is nothing but wanting to go on on: men live in order to live, in order not to die. Their persuasion is the fear of death. Being born is nothing but fearing death, so that, if death becomes certain in a certain future, they are already dead in the present. All that they do and say with fixed persuasion, a clear purpose, and evident reason is nothing but fear of death– ‘indeed, believing one is wise without being wise is nothing but fearing death.

Also, even if technocrats provide reasonable estimates of a risk, which itself is an iffy enterprise, they cannot dictate what level of risk people ought to accept. People might object to a nuclear power plant that has a minuscule risk of a meltdown not because they overestimate the risk, but because they feel that the cost of a catastrophe, no matter how remote, are too dreadful. And of course any of these trade-offs may be unacceptable if people perceive that the benefits would go to the wealthy and powerful while they themselves absorb the risks. Nonetheless, understanding the difference between our best science and our ancient ways of thinking can only make our individual and collective decisions better informed. It can help scientists and journalists explain a new technology in the face of the most common misunderstandings. And it can help all of us understand the technology so that we can accept or reject it on grounds that we can justify to ourselves and to others.

and the more I saw, the more I found to admire.

A plot is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.

Captain Harvile: Poor Phoebe, she would not have forgotten him so soon. It was not in her nature. Anne Elliot: It would not be in the nature of any woman who truly loved. Captain Harvile: Do you claim that for your sex? Anne Elliot: We do not forget you as soon as you forget us. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You always have business of some sort or other to take you back into the world. Captain Harvile: I won't allow it to be any more man's nature than women's to be inconstant or to forget those they love or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe... Let me just observe that all histories are against you, all stories, prose, and verse. I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which did not have something to say on women's fickleness. Anne Elliot: But they were all written by men.

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées." ("It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.")

Descriptions all fall flat and tame unless the Holy Ghost fills them with life and power

Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.

Even though he said no store in uncanny things, he was soldier enough to value with whatever weapon came to hand.

Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

Fatigue could be the dealmaker's friend.

Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.

For goodness that is beyond virtue, and hence beyond temptation, ignorant of the argumentative reasoning by which man fends off temptations and, by this very process, comes to know the ways, of wickedness, is also incapable of learning the arts of persuading and arguing.

Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.

Goldwater hardly ever mentioned a statistic. He hardly ever used it EXAMPLE. He presumed you already knew what he meant. Reagan SHOWED you.

Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amused them. Puns, and exaggerations, and things that were true and not at the same time.

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

He did what good lawyers always do. He shifted his argument in the direction his audience was already going.

He (LBJ) was smiling and deferential, but lots of guys can be smiling and deferential. He had something else. No matter what someone thought, Lyndon would agree with him – and would be there ahead of him, in fact. He could follow someone's mind around – and figure out where it was going and beat it there.