They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide?
Until the courts put a stop to it, public debate over same-sex marriage displayed American democracy at its best. Individuals on both sides of the issue passionately, but respectfully, attempted to persuade their fellow citizens to accept their views.
The beauty of our democracy lies in the American value of equality: if you vote, you have a seat at the table. If you speak, you have a chance to persuade others. A billionaire and a minimum wage earner have the same power at the ballot box.
I’m a piece of work, man. I will do what I want, at all times, always. Nobody’s going to persuade me one way or another. I can’t be persuaded. I take criticism, I listen, I analyze, but at the end of the day, I make the decisions. Because that’s the way I started, and that’s the way I’m going to finish.
Normally, politicians lie because they want to persuade us of the truth of what they are saying. A candidate for Congress will claim that he earned a medal of honor when he did not, so that we will love and revere him.
Their term project consists of a fieldwork collection of folklore that they create by interviewing family members, friends, or anyone they can manage to persuade to serve as an informant.
No one is going to persuade me that eight people arriving in South Shields is going to overwhelm the local system. I think that 25,000 refugees would be more in line with the U.N. That would be a substantive contribution.
I feel like you are allowed in fiction to embrace imagination and try to enter other worlds. And I feel like you should push yourself to try to persuade your reader that you have the authority to engage with people who, you know, lived in the past, who live in the future, other genders, other places, other cultures.
You tell them that all your experience tells you this is the best way to beat this particular opposition. You persuade them and you drill them, and you tell them so many times they can hear you when they go to sleep. Then, on the day of the game, you stand on the touchline and hope to God that it works.
I have always thought that pandas, in evolutionary terms, are the most sophisticated animals in the world. They cannot look after themselves; they are useless at reproducing. But to compensate, they have managed to persuade the most advanced creatures on the planet – human beings – to care for their every need.
In our system leadership is by consent, not command. To lead a President must persuade. Personal contacts and experiences help shape his thinking. They can be critical to his persuasiveness and thus to his leadership.
The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.
A man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo life, having bartered his soul to a brute-master. He is not of them. He may stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into something which they, of their own accord, would not have been.
That’s my mission: I really want to get in the heads and hearts of kids and persuade them that they can believe things they haven’t seen, they can do things that maybe others haven’t done before them, that they are more than their worst acts.
I not only urge you to vote that ticket yourself, but I beg that you will persuade others to do so. Personal effort can accomplish a great deal, and I beg that you will use your personal influence with your friends to get them to go with you to save the boys.
People appreciate and follow the person who can persuade them properly. Make that person you.
The testimony of former abortion workers can help persuade lawmakers to create fair laws that protect women from dirty abortion facilities.
If I can get you to laugh with me, you like me better, which makes you more open to my ideas. And if I can persuade you to laugh at the particular point I make, by laughing at it you acknowledge its truth.
If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That’s flexibility.
I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.
It is one thing to open job opportunities. It is another to train people to fill them, or to persuade American enterprise to seek Negro as well as white applicants.
I’ve never interviewed anyone where I set out to try to persuade them to reveal something. Instead, it’s about creating a space that allows someone to be authentic without judgment on my part.
Provided someone can persuade me, I will invest in anything.
I believe in believing. My coach John Kavanagh is a big atheist, and he is always trying to persuade people to his way of thinking, and I think, ‘What a waste of energy.’ If people want to believe in this god or that god, that’s fine by me; believe away. But I think we can be our own gods. I believe in myself.
I never did very well in math – I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn’t meant my answers literally.
The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world.
If I were in the government, I would persuade the prime minister to see the beauty in the fact that people see Israel as a haven – from their sadness to their hope.
I’m a leader, not a dictator. I want to persuade people rather than threaten or control them.
I would quite like to do something on Ireland about the culture, James Joyce, Yeats, persuade Seamus Heaney to have a chat and do some cooking.
The passions are the only orators which always persuade.
I grew up in Mexico, not the U.S., and the fact is that there just aren’t any parts for Latin actresses. I have to persuade people that my accent won’t be a problem, but an asset.
Advertisers with their bag of goodies and promotions have entered classrooms and begun to put up billboards and posters inside schools. They persuade cash-starved schools into opening their doors to them by paying for access to classrooms and space for their advertising material and promotions.
I work in a world of words – words that inspire, words that persuade and, increasingly, words that can send the message that it is acceptable to hate.
Just once I would like to persuade the audience not to wear any article of blue denim. If only they could see themselves in a pair of brown corduroys like mine instead of this awful, boring blue denim.
You have to persuade yourself that you absolutely don’t care what happens. If you don’t care, you’ve won. I absolutely promise you, in every serious negotiation, the man or woman who doesn’t care is going to win.
The president is entitled to try to persuade Congress and the American people to pursue whatever policies he thinks are needed. But he is not entitled to shut down the government when he fails to persuade us.
Do not let arguments of expediency persuade you. That is the slow road to oblivion. That is the tortured path to undoing step by step, bit by bit, as the river creates a canyon, the way of life that we love.
We’ve got to rebuild human hearts – and persuade people that hope isn’t just possible, but essential.
Perhaps, despite my objections, the success of films like: ‘The Help,’ ‘Django,’ ‘The Butler,’ or ’12 Years a Slave,’ will further persuade Hollywood to widen its view and edit its erroneous perception of what a commercial black film can look like.
Pages: 1 2
