It’s amazing, the lies you can tell yourself. Even more amazing, the lies you can believe when you’re desperate enough.
Quotes on persuasion
I never saw quite so wretched an example of what a sea-faring life can do: but to a degree, I know it is the same with them all; they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once, before they reach Admiral Baldwin’s age.
Never argue. To win an argument is to lose a sale.
Fifties advertising was a dogmatic art, to the point of pretending to be a science.
It is the tendency of deep feeling to subdue the manner rather than to render it too energetic.
Get what you can with words, because words are free, but the words of an armed man ring that much sweeter.
You perceive the force of a word. He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense… Give me the right word and the right accent and I will move the world.
There is hardly any personal defect which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to.
But some of it (evangelistic persuasion) is going to come through service. The deficit that many Christians face is that people look at followers of Christ more for what they’re against than what they’re for.
His ally was the age-old, unending human search for truth and security. In the first century as the twenty first, some were devout, some superstitious, others were frankly materialistic, even though in that age they paid lip service to the gods. Others, contemptuous of religion, believed only in mankind. But at heart, when disguises were torn away and defenses broken, lay the same anxieties and hopes.