Sigmund Freud
Neurologist, Psychoanalyst
"Knowledge is the intellectual manipulation of carefully verified observations."
Manipulation quotes
Manipulation
101 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Paulo Freire
Educator, Author
"One of the methods of manipulation is to inoculate individuals with the bourgeois appetite for personal success."
Henry Ford
Industrialist
"Speculation is only a word covering the making of money out of the manipulation of prices, instead of supplying goods and services."
Sunny Murray
Musician
"I was able to interpret the difference between the sharp, quick sound and the slow, deep sound of percussion and manipulate it, get a third sound out of things, if the beats were rapid enough."
Laozi
Philosopher
"Don't impose your will through manipulation of aggressive emotions and actions."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside manipulation — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Manipulation quotes (page 1 of 6)
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"Poetry's role is to provide spontaneous individual candor as distinct from manipulation and brainwash."
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"Americans are not only a less homogenous population than we were when we were 3 million ex-colonists, but we're less educated. On top of that, we have constant misinformation and manipulation by media."
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"There is a considerable amount of manipulation in the printmaking from the straight photograph to the finished print. If I do my job correctly that shouldn't be visible at all, it should be transparent."
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"Prayer and action...can never be seen as contradictory or mutually exclusive. Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation."
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"No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love."
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"Welfare programs as instruments of manipulation ultimately serve the end of conquest. They act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems and from the concrete solutions of these problems."
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"Genuine sincerity opens people's hearts, while manipulation causes them to close."
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"I never felt a need to manipulate my career from the outside - try to be someone I wasn't to get ahead."
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"Cultural institutions by and large share one primary objective: herd control. Even when ostensibly benign, their propensity for manipulation, compartmentalization, standardization and suppression of potentially disruptive behavior or ideas, has served to freeze the evolution of consciousness practically in its tracks."
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"Representative Leo J. Ryan understood the manipulation phenomena people were describing to him and he lost his life in a Guyanese jungle investigating how Jim Jones "bent minds."
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"What we have in common is a mass men, a mass bureaucracy, and a manipulation of everyone to act smoothly, but with the illusion that he follows his own decisions and opinions."
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"I always try to just be honest ... As opposed to artifice or manipulation."
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"If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble."
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"The lack of a sense of history makes us really prey to manipulation."
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"I tried to manipulate and control people, and I harbored resentment. I wanted to be forgiven, but I wouldn't forgive others."
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