Manipulator Quotes & Sayings

The photographer is a manipulator of light; photography is a manipulation of light. — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

You are a manipulator when you try to persuade people to do something that is not in their best interests but is in yours. You are a motivator when you find goals that will be good for both sides, then weld together a high-achieving, high-morale partnership to achieve them. — Alan Loy McGinnis

Playing the victim role: Manipulator portrays him- or herself as a victim of circumstance or of someone else's behavior in order to gain pity, sympathy or evoke compassion and thereby get something from another. Caring and conscientious people cannot stand to see anyone suffering and the manipulator often finds it easy to play on sympathy to get cooperation. — George K. Simon

The interplay of depravity here, as it relates to the prostitute's contribution, is in the wilful manoeuvring necessary to mirror the requests and requirements of a psychologically fragile male mind. Manipulation is quite necessary. In fact, with this type of man, it is mandatory; the ability to carry it out is simply a requirement of the job. This is not evidence of some sort of prostitutes' autonomy. It is evidence that this type of client must recognise in his 'mistress' the actions of a master manipulator. There is one reason for this: it arouses him. It is not, truly, at its core, about the woman being in control; it is about the man's need to perceive her to be. In — Rachel Moran

Now the power of the imagination is a unifying power, hence the force of metaphor; and the poet is the supreme manipulator of metaphor ... the world needs the unifying power of the imagination. The two things that give it best are poetry and religion. — R.S. Thomas

My broken identity turned me into a manipulator and my romantic life looked like one of those fishing shows on television, a game of catch and release in which I only held the girl long enough to snap a picture. — Donald Miller

If you drain others energy a lot, you don't want to see this because you do it yourself; but remember, it's real easy to manipulate a manipulator. — Frederick Lenz

What better gift for a manipulator that indifference? — Miguel El Portugues

I've never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on. — Matthew McConaughey

The myth of the detached manipulator and compliant crowd has, since the Twenties, also been abundantly re-echoed by academic students of mass suasion. — Edward L. Bernays

I don't need a director who's 'good with actors.' ... A master manipulator is heaven. — Frances McDormand

You don't influence people by commanding them. When you are doing that, you are a manipulator and not a leader. — Israelmore Ayivor

I was an emotional manipulator of fighters ... You have to know how to be cold, you know? Just have no -emotions, no feelings. It takes time, though, to develop that. I'd been working on that since I was 12 years old. It doesn't happen overnight. — Mike Tyson

If we're highly empathetic and emotionally sensitive we're at greater risk of becoming involved with a manipulator. — Adelyn Birch

I wanted to talk to her because she seemed the most likely to not be manipulating me, but because she looked like the one least likely to manipulate me, she could in fact be the master manipulator, manipulating me into manipulating myself by asking for her help, ergo - yeah, I'd looked it up and it wasn't a person - I'd fallen right into her trap. Got it? Glad somebody did. — A&E Kirk

You are really a manipulator. There's no better word, and you're twisting and manipulating people to get the totality, which exists only in your mind. What I've said to producers, what I've said to lots of people is, "Don't worry about that. I've seen the movie. I'm the only one who has seen the movie, and I know what the movie is, and that's what I'm getting on film. I'm getting as close as I can to the movie I've already seen. — Mark Travis

You are a manipulator.
I like to think of myself more as an outcome engineer. — J.R. Ward

Gee, talk about a master manipulator. I didn't know whether to be scared or impressed by this young man. — Angela Richardson

distinguish the friend from the manipulator? The answer is simple: the true teacher is not the one who teaches us the ideal path, but the one who shows us the many ways of reaching the path that we need to travel if we are to find our destiny. Once we have found that path, the teacher cannot help us anymore, because its challenges are unique. This applies to neither love nor war, but unless we understand it, we will never get anywhere. — Paulo Coelho

Priests are always easy to blame. They make convenient scapegoats - after all, anyone with a strong faith different from your own must either be a crazy zealot or a lying manipulator. — Brandon Sanderson

To borrow from Budd Schulberg's description of a media manipulator in his classic novel The Harder They Fall, I was "indulging myself in the illusions that we can deal in filth without becoming the thing we touch." I no longer have those illusions. Winston Churchill wrote of the appeasers of his age that "each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last." I was even more delusional. I thought I could skip being devoured entirely. It would never turn on me. I was in control. I was the expert. But I was wrong. — Ryan Holiday

Satan is the illusive manipulator. He prances and dances and drinks in the adulation of his worshippers as he glimmers and shimmers, displaying all that glitters and all that attracts the shallowness of man. — Billy Graham

I want to be seen as a good storyteller. I'm a manipulator as well. — Wilbur Smith

Watching you try to be a smooth manipulator is like watching a moose do ballet. What did you do, read Machiavelli for Dummies? Or — Elliott James

It's true the manipulator is the loneliest person in the world. And the second loneliest is the person being manipulated. Unless we're honest with each other, we can't connect. We can't be intimate. Only God can penetrate a manipulative person's heart, and even then, he sits quietly, waiting for them to stop running their con. — Donald Miller

The obvious differences apart, Karl Marx was no more a reliable prophet than was the Reverend Jim Jones. Karl Marx was a genius, an uncannily resourceful manipulator of world history who shoved everything he knew, thought, and devised into a Ouija board from whose movements he decocted universal laws. He had his following, during the late phases of the Industrial Revolution. But he was discredited by historical experience longer ago than the Wizard of Oz: and still, great grown people sit around, declare themselves to be Marxists, and make excuses for Gulag and Afghanistan. — William F. Buckley Jr.

If you are an approval addict, your behaviour is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: Give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game. — Harriet B. Braiker

She pretends to be an actress, even though she hasn't even done enough acting to be a wannabe. But she's a real Academy Award winning manipulator. — Kenneth Eade

Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator. — Wyndham Lewis

My name is Asher Lev ... I am a traitor, an apostate, a self-hater, an inflicter of shame upon my family, my friends, my people; also, I am a mocker of ideas sacred to Christians, a blasphemous manipulator of modes and forms revered by Gentiles for two thousand years. — Chaim Potok

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn't make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they'd just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain's anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew? The best social manipulator on Earth might not know what neurons were, and neither might the best Legilimens. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

In truth, we were similar. Like two sides of a fan, we were at odds with each other, we competed with each other, but our fates similarly rested in the hands of the Emperor--the holder, the commander, the manipulator of our destinies. — Weina Dai Randel

When I think about satan, my thoughts go to how Jesus interacted with him in the desert. Jesus spoke with him for just a few seconds and then sent him away. Satan was a manipulator who wanted to control God, but Jesus had a relationship with God that satan didn't understand, and Jesus had no problem telling him off and getting rid of him. I think we should do the same. — Bob Goff

What there is no dispute about is whether or not China is a currency manipulator. They are a currency manipulator. They actively intervene every single day to keep the value of their currency less than it would be against the dollar than if it floated freely. We think. Even China barely disputes that. — Adam Davidson

Photography is a powerful medium of persuasion and propaganda. It has that ring of truth when all the time, in artful hands, it can make any statement the manipulator chooses. — Michael Langford

Music moves society more than most people realize. In my opinion, it's a soft manipulator of influence and change. — Kim Harrison

It was new to play a woman who plays with her sincerity, and who is a seductress, a manipulator and a liar! I was able to compose a character as opposed to being very natural, so it was very interesting for me. It was great to realise that I could be this kind of real woman! — Audrey Tautou

A formal manipulator in mathematics often experiences the discomforting feeling that his pencil surpasses him in intelligence. — Howard Whitley Eves

No morally imperfect human being(s), born into "the double darkness of sin and ignorance" could ever qualify for the position of Master Utilitarian Manipulator that Consequentialism needs to be put into practice. — John C. Wright

A storyteller makes us feel something. Makes us give a shit when we have no good reason to do so. Fun is not the last stop on the story train. The storyteller is master manipulator. The storyteller is cackling puppetmaster. — Chuck Wendig

As soon as a person indicates that they are willing to absorb guilt, a manipulator will stick to that person like glue and feed on their energy. This dynamic can be avoided simply by refusing to take on feelings of guilt. You do not have to justify yourself to anyone and you do not owe anybody anything. If you are to blame for something then you can accept the punishment, as long as you do not get stuck in the position of the guilty party afterwards. You do not owe those close to you anything either; after all, you care about them because you love them not because you have been coerced into doing so. This is a completely different matter. If you have a tendency to justify yourself, start letting go of it; once manipulative individuals realize they no longer have a way of hooking into your energy they will leave you alone. Guilt goes — Vadim Zeland

He's playing every bit as hard as I am, only he knows what he's doing and I don't. Don't blame me because he's a better manipulator than I am - I haven't been around long enough to learn all his tricks. — Stephenie Meyer