Quotes about Persuasion

When you go to women," says Nietzsche, "take your whip with you.

His faith wavered, but not his speech: it is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the crowd, that he must often speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come back to-morrow.

Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.

I'm not a big believer in trying to jam stuff down somebody's throat: 'You're going to do it my way.' I'd rather show by example and live my life and have people say, 'You know what, I want to live like Joel has. He's got peace and joy, and he seems content.'

A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.

To defend his position he piles up text upon text, waves his sword like a blind-folded gladiator, rattles his noisy tongue, and ends with wounding no one but himself.

Every man naturally persuades himself that he can keep his resolutions, nor is he convinced of his imbecility but by length of time and frequency of experiment.

If you can make a woman laugh, you can make her do anything.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions-that is, to name them and

Dialectic as a whole, or of one of its parts, to consider every kind of syllogism in a similar manner, it is clear that he who is most capable of examining the matter and forms of a syllogism will be in the highest degree a master of rhetorical argument

rhetoric was to be surveyed from the standpoint of philosophy.