Propaganda Quotes
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Just released in 1994 is Christina Hoff Sommers’s landmark study, Who Stole Feminism? , which uses ingenious detective work to unmask the shocking fraud and propaganda of establishment feminism and the servility of American media and academe to Machiavellian feminist manipulation. This bracingly precise, fact-based book should be required reading for every journalist. Sommers is a courageous academic philosopher who was one of the very first to systematically critique current feminist ideology and who took tremendous abuse for it. … Sommers has done a great service for women and for feminism, whose fundamental precepts she has clarified and strengthened.
camille paglia— p. xvi (Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders : Academe in the Hour of the Wolf)
The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy. For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct.
walter lippmann— Liberty and the News, "What Modern Liberty Means" (1920)
Again I want to emphasize that the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of a technological society. propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world.
jacques ellul— From the Vintage paperback (1973), p.xvii
All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.
— 1942 Diary entry,14 Mar.
The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.
jacques ellul— Vintage, p.9.
...[T]ry not to be too angry or disappointed with your fellow Americans. Most of them don't care about politics as much as the majority of my readers, and the education they have received about it from the government's public school system is nothing more than a septic tank full of warmed-over self-serving statist lies and leftist propaganda.
l. neil smith— "Only Nixon,"[17] 9 November 2008
Furthermore, all the Western politicians, intellectuals and journalists are obliged to pay homage and bow to the monument that commemorates those allegedly killed in the Nazi concentration camps. In other words, all should acknowledge the veracity of something that has not been proven! This is also one of the propaganda means being applied by the Zionists to portray themselves as the victims of persecution!
ali khamenei— January 31, 2002 statements to the Islamic World Media conference held in Tehran
When we consider propaganda as the attempt to shape the thoughts and feelings of others, in ways conforming to the aims of the communicator, we find a vast array of different examples throughout history.
randal marlin— Chapter Two, History Of Propaganda, p. 43
When you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you (or less than nothing) I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words, "freedom". You confuse freedom the only freedom with absolute tyranny… all over this so called world, hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.
e. e. cummings— Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams
The criminal law has, from the point of view of thwarted virtue, the merit of allowing an outlet for those impulses of aggression which cowardice, disguised as morality, restrains in their more spontaneous forms. War has the same merit. You must not kill you neighbor, whom perhaps you genuinely hate, but by a little propaganda this hate can be transferred to some foreign nation, against whom all your murderous impulses become patriotic heroism.
bertrand russell— Part III: Man and Himself, Ch. 17: Fear, p. 175.
I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It isgenerally regarded here as more reliable than the press.
— 1941 In the Partisan Review,15 Apr. Reprinted in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol.2.
We're so saturated with propaganda every way you look that we don't notice it. But when it isn't there, you notice.
james p. hogan— Ch. 28 (Paths to Otherwhere (1996))
The “Conqueror of Berlin,” as he [Joseph Goebbels] has named himself, has completely conquered Germany. And not only that. Unfortunately, many, all too many Germans living abroad, also have fallen for the cunning propaganda.
friedrich kellner— October 14, 1939; Vol. 1, p. 40
Communication is always " propaganda ." The emitter always wants "to get something across."
Peter Drucker— Chapter 38, pg.487
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.
terry eagleton— Ch. 10, The Critic as Clown
If in order to keep the wheels turning you have to deafen ears with propaganda, crack the whip of Terror, and keep pushing people around, then you haven't got a machine civilization no matter how numerous and ingenious your machines.
Eric Hoffer— Ch. 5: "The Readiness to Work"
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
aldous huxley— "Pacifism and Philosophy" (1936)
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.
aldous huxley— Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)
Soviet propaganda is remarkably effective and the Americans are even more remarkably stupid.
muhammad reza pahlavi— As quoted in Asadollah Alam (1991), The Shah and I: The Confidential Diary of Iran's Royal Court, 1968-77, page 508
De propaganda prole quaestio, non secus atque quaelibet quaestio humanam vitam attingens, ultra particulares alias eiusdem generis rationes - cuiusmodi eae sunt, quae biologicae aut psychologicae, demographicae aut sociologicae appellantur
Pope Paul VI— HUMANAE VITAETranslation: The question of human procreation, like every other question which touches human life, involves more than the limited aspects specific to such disciplines as biology, psychology, demography or sociology.Official Vatican translation.
A typical piece of BBC anti-Tory propaganda.
norman tebbit— From an article published in a 1985 edition of the Monday Club magazine 'Right Ahead' which was heavily critical of the BBC and of what Tebbit regarded as the corporation's left-wing bias. Tebbit was referring to an episode of the popular BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who entitled 'Pyramids of Mars' which he had recently seen - he perceived a "wasteland version of 1980" featured in the episode to be a symbolic, allegorical and propagandistic attack on the Thatcher government. Tebbit was apparently completely unaware that the episode in question was actually filmed in 1975, four years before Thatcher had even come to power. [Eric Luskin, Doctor Who in the 80s (Virgin, 1996)]
Attention must be given to the penal consequences of violations of the right to peace, including the punishment by domestic courts or in due time by the International Criminal Court of those who have engaged in aggression and propaganda for war.
alfred de zayas— United Nations General Assembly - Promotion of a democratic and equitable international order [31]
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in subsituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly,those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.
aldous huxley— In "Pacifism and Philosophy" (1936)
The “Conqueror from Berlin,” as he has named himself, has completely conquered Germany. And not only that. Unfortunately, many, all too many Germans living abroad, also have fallen for the cunning propaganda.
friedrich kellner— Friedrich Kellner, My Opposition (14 October 1939)
In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.
— Yakov Smirnoff, reported in Bob Fenster (2005). Laugh Off: The Comedy Showdown Between Real Life And The Pros. Andrews McMeel Publishing, p. 101. ISBN 0740754688.
No one should be under the illusion that negotiations for the sake of negotiations always advance the cause of peace. If for lack of preparation they break up in bitterness, the prospects of peace have been endangered. If they are made a forum for propaganda or a cover for aggression, the processes of peace have been abused.
— John F. Kennedy during his Address at the University of Washington's 100th Anniversary Program (16 November 1961).
