So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wire-tapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept. Christopher Hitchens
Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught falsehoods in school. And the person that dares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool. Plato
The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits – a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage. Hunter S Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals. Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd
Propaganda ... serves more to justify ourselves than to convince others; and the more reason we have to feel guilty, the more fervent our propaganda. Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements
The objection to propaganda is not only its appeal to unreason, but still more the unfair advantage which it gives to the rich and powerful. Bertrand Russell
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling? Bertrand Russell
Without some form of censorship, propaganda in the strict sense of the word is impossible. In order to conduct a propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks wise or desirable. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion
But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another? ibid.
If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly. Thomas Sowell
When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn’t about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind. Brian Eno
In any war, there is a concealment of certain kinds of setbacks because it’s propaganda for the enemy. Kate Adie
The United States has its own propaganda, but it’s very effective because people don’t realize that it’s propaganda. And it’s subtle, but it’s actually a much stronger propaganda machine than the Nazis had but it’s funded in a different way. Crispin Glover
We have to stop the propaganda, the shameful propaganda used by the Kremlin to rehabilitate these old types. Garry Kasparov
As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests. Gore Vidal, Imperial America, 2004
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back, 1976
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. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, 1900
It is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated during the early years of life, whilst the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct; and the very essence of an instinct is that it is followed independently of reason. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man 1871
See, in my line of work you’ve got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda. George W Bush
Somehow the average citizen thinks that his or her mind could never be manipulated, and yet every day we’re manipulated by each other, we’re manipulated by advertising – a thousand things impact and manipulate us in different ways. Margaret Singer, Emeritus Professor Berkeley UC
Every night I watch the nightly news. It’s funded by the pharmaceutical companies. Virtually every ad is a drug ad. They get their say every night on the nightly news through advertising. Michael Moore
People act on those commercials. Those commercials have real influence. They are done scientifically to get into your unconscious mind. Charles Juntikka, bankruptcy attorney
Advertising was manipulation. It was a way to get you to do something that didn’t come out of you. It came out of somebody else ... And I said, Why? That’s not who I am ... I want to be me. Robert Pardun, 1960s student activist
Large-scale efforts are being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes ... The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders
The Israeli Press Office is spitting out press releases, statements, information, all the time. Alisa Solomon, journalist The Village Voice
The propaganda machine is even more effective than it is in Israel. American news coverage is influenced by a complex set of institutional relationships. These influences can be thought of as a series of filters through which the news must travel before it emerges in the voices of news anchors. To understand how American news media report on the Middle East conflict we need to understand how these institutional filters operate. Among the most important of these filters are the business interests of the corporations that own the mass media ... The government of Israel employs some of the largest American public relations firms as image consultants to coordinate its media and political campaigns. Nine Israeli consulates help implement these PR campaigns by developing relationships with journalists and monitoring media outlets. Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, 2004
North Korea: The following broadcast will be shocking and cause distress for all citizens of the DPKR but Our Dear Leader sees no other alternative than to illuminate the hidden perils of the Western Imperialists and their pernicious threat to our glorious nation. Propaganda, opening caption, Youtube 2012
This is a film about psychological warfare, a specific warfare designed to distract, misinform and anaesthetize the brain. It has many disguises … Public Relations and Propaganda are interchangeable … Anything that keeps the masses from organising themselves and asking important questions about what their masters are really up to. ibid.
And the result? Not only single undemocratic country has been turned into a genuinely democratic country. ibid.
Using the poorest people’s children to do the fighting. It’s important to note that these cowards were happy to order mass death and destruction despite never having been in battle themselves. Is this democracy? ibid.
Both the European Parliament and the US House have both passed bills targeting Russian Propaganda websites. The Corbett Report, The Abnormalization of Dissent, James Corbett online 2016
It’s people like me … I’m suddenly learning I’m a Putin puppet. ibid.