Quotes about Propaganda

To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, not even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.

"Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled.  All our difficulty comes with the others.  When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?  He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem.  We have to recondition him.  But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning.  They're all right already.  They'll believe anything." -Miss Hardcastle

Since winners write the history, the false propaganda used from the beginning to the end is often accepted as the true history of the war.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

"...the unconscious one does not betray. He walks secure through life. But we who are a part of the tradition--the Europeans--and who carry on the tradition we have betrayed with awareness, insight and consciousness, we have carefully analyzed all the wars before they were declared. But we did not stop them. (And many amongst us became the propagandists of the wars as soon as they were declared.) We describe how the poor are plundered by the rich. We live among the rich. Live on the plunder and pander the ideas to the rich. We have described the torture and we have put our names under appeals against torture, but we did not stop it. (And we ourselves became torturers when the higher interests demanded torture and we became the ideologists of torture.) Now we once more can analyze the world situation and describe the wars and explain why the many are poor and hungry. But we do no more. We are not the bearers of consciousness. We are the whores of reason."

The weblog possesses an unmatched ability to create targeted serendipity by presenting its self-selected audience with the news and trivia that is predictably interesting and useful. But the very idea of serendipity demands that the discoveries so provided be to some extent unexpected. When news stories are rigorously selected to align with predetermined worldview, human filters become little more than propaganda machines.

Laws just or unjust may govern men's actions. Tyrannies may restrain or regulate their words. The machinery of propaganda may pack their minds with falsehood and deny them truth for many generations of time. But the soul of man thus held in trance or frozen in a long night can be awakened by a spark coming from God knows where and in a moment the whole structure of lies and oppression is on trial for its life.

Some time ago a member of my family sent to me a critical article written by Mr. Edmund Fuller in a publication called Saturday Review. The criticism of the writer is directed against the effort made to satisfy what the author designates as "general religious hunger," with books, articles, and public appearances of nationally advertised individuals, carrying on a propaganda for what is characterized as (these are quotes) "the good life," "peace of mind," "positive thinking," and "successful" or "confident living." What the author objects to most strenuously is not so much that propaganda should be issued for the optimism of "peace of mind" and "positive thinking," but that this psychological optimism should be held out in any form as an interpretation of or a substitute for the real Christian religion.

Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

We have made the Reich by propaganda.

Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through the press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls [are] a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind.

The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one.

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.

The same day I saw my first horror camp, I visited every nook and cranny. I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.

Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking.

In my opinion turkey is the most over-rated critter for eating purposes in kingdom come but the most striking example we have of the power of propaganda.

Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially insofar as it might bring out something favorable for the opponent.