Propaganda Quotes
More Propaganda Quotes
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
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)
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
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
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.
A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.
Saul Bellow— "Cousins," from Him With His Foot in His Mouth and Other Stories (1984), p. 263
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
When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.
randal marlin— Chapter Eight, Propaganda, Democracy, And the Internet, p. 302
The best goal for propaganda analysis is to develop such an understanding of the phenomenon that it will no longer be profitable for people to engage in it.
randal marlin— Chapter Eight, Propaganda, Democracy, And the Internet, p. 306
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
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)
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.
aldous huxley— Chapter 7 (p. 63)
Because our ladies mostly attend Kalatshepams, (Religious discourses) they have fallen prey to the superstitions, blind beliefs, and immorality by the false and fictituous propaganda of the Brahmins
periyar e. v. ramasamy— Quoted in Collected Works of Periyar E.V.R., p.517
We thus have a kind of see-saw: first, pure persuasion leading to the conversion of a minority; then force exerted to secure that the rest of the community shall be exposed to the right propaganda; and finally a genuine belief on the part of the great majority, which makes the use of force again unnecessary.
bertrand russell— Ch. 9: Power over opinion.
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]
As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.
slavoj Žižek— Last remark in an interview for the CN8 show Nitebeat (2003) YouTube video
American traditions and the American ethic require us to be truthful, but the most important reason is that truth is the best propaganda and lies are the worst. To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It is as simple as that.
edward r. murrow— Speaking as the Director of USIA, in testimony before a Congressional Committee (May 1963).
The US has always taken velvet revolution into consideration by promoting Western culture in the society and by causing strife between people and the government through propaganda , organizing certain individuals, psychological warfare and making intentional use of media, intellectual circles, university student's establishments and feminism movements in order to implement its interfering policies.
— Cleric says US seeks velvet revolution, Press TV, 20 Jul 2007
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 food situation in the world is serious enough, it seems to me, to justify an extension of birth control propaganda to include the practice of abortion. There must be a decreasing birth rate for some years to come and all means ought to be employed to bring it about if we are to avoid aggravation of all the evils of over population ... Let us frankly admit that birth control means just what it says and includes both prevention of conception and abortion.
— Herman Dekker, letter to the Editor (Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood), Birth Control Review (August, 1920).
