PROPAGANDA QUOTES
quotations about propaganda
It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression.
REVILO P. OLIVER
Liberty Bell, April 1980
The more complicated things become, the more difficult they are to explain, yet there is more need than ever for explanation, and accordingly more opportunities arise for propaganda's handy explanations.
BRIAN ANSE PATRICK
The Ten Commandments of Propaganda
No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
EDWARD BERNAYS
Propaganda
We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons ... who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.
EDWARD BERNAYS
Propaganda
In time of war, when truth is so precious, it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
WINSTON CHURCHILL
The Second World War, Volume V: Closing the Ring
[In] Democratic societies ... the state can't control behavior by force. It can to some extent, but it's much more limited in its capacity to control by force. Therefore, it has to control what you think.... One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there's a debate going on, but making sure that that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Chronicles of Dissent: Propaganda in the U.S. vs. the U.S.S.R.
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
HANNAH ARENDT
The Origins of Totalitarianism
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.
B. W. POWE
Towards a Canada of Light
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
EDWARD BERNAYS
Propaganda
It can be considered a rule that the probable duration of an Empire may be prognosticated by the degree to which its rulers believe in their own propaganda.
DORIS LESSING
The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire
It is by far easier for propagandists to work with the ideas preexisting in people's heads. Dislodging preexisting ideas by means of propaganda is often much more difficult than an original installation.
BRIAN ANSE PATRICK
The Ten Commandments of Propaganda
Propaganda is not usually a lie (because a lie is not instrumental to its ends), but persuasion, and not the seeking of truth, it the objective. In fact there is no 'unvarnished truth' anywhere, and even the success of ideas is inseparable from the fact and process of their propagation.
NICHOLAS J. O'SHAUGHNESSY
Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction
Revolutionary propaganda is in its deepest sense the negation of the existing conditions of the State, for, with respect to its innermost nature, it has no other program than the destruction of whatever order prevails at the time.
MIKHAIL BAKUNIN
"The Reaction in Germany"
Can there then be no meritorious propaganda? The genre itself is viewed by many as inherently immoral and even its wartime uses consigned to the historical limbo of necessary evil, like the bombing of cities. Examples of a virtuous propaganda are more numerous than we would imagine, and propaganda is not merely a psychotic expression of our social dysfunctionality. There can be a virtuous propaganda, when for example propaganda represents an alternative strategy to legal coercion, as demonstrated by the comparison between the very different attempts to deal with the scourge of illegal drugs and that of cigarettes.
NICHOLAS J. O'SHAUGHNESSY
Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction
Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
EDWARD BERNAYS
Propaganda
The term propaganda rings melodramatic and exaggerated, but a press that -- whether from fear, careerism, or conviction -- uncritically recites false government claims and reports them as fact, or treats elected officials with a reverence reserved for royalty, cannot be accurately described as engaged in any other function.
GLENN GREENWALD
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
The fabulous effects ascribed to propaganda have no greater foundation in fact than the fall of the walls of Jericho ascribed to the blast of Joshua's trumpets.
ERIC HOFFER
The True Believer
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it.
LYSANDER SPOONER
An Essay on the Trial by Jury
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
UPTON SINCLAIR
Mammonart: An Essay in Economic Interpretation