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.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one's ability to persuade.

I would love to persuade Christopher Bailey to get even just a section of Burberry that's, like, organic or free trade. I love him, he's a very good person and an amazing designer, and I have a lot of respect and time for him.

From this point of view, science - the real game in town - is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one's manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.

Truth persuades by teaching, but does not teach by persuading.

It's a strange truth that no matter how persuaded we might be of our own correctness, the discomfiting realization that others disagree with us causes a paralyzing inability to argue the case convincingly.

At times to be silent is to lie. You will win because you have enough brute force. But you will not convince. For to convince you need to persuade. And in order to persuade you would need what you lack: Reason and Right

People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.

Believe me if you consult philosophy she will persuade you not to lit so long at your counting desk

Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.

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.

Travel which was once either a necessity or an adventure has become very largely a commodity and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement too.

It is impossible to persuade a man who does not disagree but smiles.

We are not directly involved in Syria. But we will be working with our partners in the European Union and at the United Nations to see if we can persuade the Syrian authorities to go as I say more in that direction of respect for democracy and human rights.

First President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.

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.

There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.

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 standard rumor at the time was that Rumsfeld as chief of staff had persuaded President Ford to appoint George H.W. Bush as director of Central Intelligence assuming that that got rid of a potential competitor for the presidency.

I never did very well in math - I could never seem to persuade the teacher that I hadn't meant my answers literally.

We must seek to persuade member states and institutions that better regulation in Europe does not mean cutting health and safety in the workplace nor does it mean dismantling social standards.

It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.