Propaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man - the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. It must therefore utilize the most common feelings, the most widespread ideas, the crudest patterns, and in so doing place itself on a very low level with regard to what it wants man to do and to what end. Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.
For the machine, because of the way it is built, can work only in a given direction, no matter who pulls its levers.
The Pashtuns feel discriminated against by the Americans because they supported the Taliban and the war is still going on in their region with continued U. S. bombing. They are also disgruntled at the overwhelming power of their ethnic rivals the Tajiks, who dominate the security forces in Kabul and control the key levers of political power. Although Karzai is a Pashtun also, many Pashtuns consider him a hostage to the Tajiks and Americans.
Would you pull the lever for yourself, Ben Affleck? What has Barack Obama meant to your movie career, Ben?
I'm always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials.
Trifles lighter than straws are levers in the building up of character.
Pride is always a better lever against the nobility than reason.
Nature does not suffer her veil to be taken from her, and what she does not choose to reveal to the spirit, thou wilt not wrest from her by levers and screws.
Also, rights are not things that are given in the heavens. Rather, they are levers for political articulations, which enables what was previously invisible to become visible.
Sometimes terror and pain are not the best levers; deception, when it works, is the most elegant and the least expensive manipulation of all.
Inventor: A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.
Give anyone a lever long enough and they can change the world. It's unreliable levers that are the problem.
Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.
The assassination at Sarajevo was certainly the crucial precedent of the European war that its conspirators had sought, but was not the historical cause. . . The assassination acted as a lever, prying the various powers into predictable paths.
Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change.
Mathematics commands all my respect, but I have no use for engines.
The more closely [the German army] converged on [Stalingrad], the narrower became their scope for tactical manoeuvre as a lever in loosening resistance. By contrast, the narrowing of the frontage made it easier for the defender to switch his local reserves to any threatened point on the defensive arc.
As the component parts of all new machines may be said to be old[,] it is a nice discriminating judgment, which discovers that a particular arrangement will produce a new and desired effect. . . . Therefore, the mechanic should sit down among levers, screws, wedges, wheels, etc. like a poet among the letters of the alphabet, considering them as the exhibition of his thoughts; in which a new arrangement transmits a new idea to the world.
The pen is the lever that moves the world.
I don't belong to anything, nobody's listening to me and I don't have any levers that control my own life.
