PROPAGANDA QUOTES II
quotations about propaganda
A critical narrative in which the modernist writer rescues art from the dragon of propaganda is inadequate: modernism and propaganda are too complexly entwined to permit the consolation of facile redemption.
MARK WOLLAEGER
Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945
If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.
EDWARD BERNAYS
Propaganda
Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.
GERTRUDE STEIN
Paris France
But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success.
ADOLF HITLER
Mein Kampf
Whether ... propaganda is good or bad depends upon the merit of the cause urged, and the correctness of the information published.
EDWARD BERNAYS
Propaganda
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
In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda 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 distractions.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
Brave New World Revisited
The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus.
NOAM CHOMSKY
Chronicles of Dissent: Propaganda in the U.S. vs. the U.S.S.R.
Propaganda is as powerful as heroin; it surreptitiously dissolves all capacity to think.
GIL COURTEMANCHE
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is desired to reach.... The more modest the scientific tenor of this propaganda and the more it is addressed exclusively to public sentiment, the more decisive will be its success.
ADOLF HITLER
Mein Kampf
The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
ALEX CAREY
Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
Since these ideas of what is beautiful and humane have no place in warfare, they are not to be used as standards of war propaganda. During the War, propaganda was a means to an end. And this end was the struggle for existence of the German nation. Propaganda, therefore, should have been regarded from the standpoint of its utility for that purpose. The most cruel weapons were then the most humane, provided they helped towards a speedier decision; and only those methods were good and beautiful which helped towards securing the dignity and freedom of the nation. Such was the only possible attitude to adopt towards war propaganda in the life-or-death struggle. If those in what are called positions of authority had realized this there would have been no uncertainty about the form and employment of war propaganda as a weapon; for it is nothing but a weapon, and indeed a most terrifying weapon in the hands of those who know how to use it.
ADOLF HITLER
Mein Kampf
No honest journalist should be willing to describe himself or herself as 'embedded.' To say, 'I'm an embedded journalist' is to say, 'I'm a government Propagandist.'
NOAM CHOMSKY
Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World
It is a mistake to organize the direct propaganda as if it were a manifold system of scientific instruction. The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward. If this principle be forgotten and if an attempt be made to be abstract and general, the propaganda will turn out ineffective; for the public will not be able to digest or retain what is offered them in this way.
ADOLF HITLER
Mein Kampf
It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.
JOSEPH GOEBBELS
attributed, Propaganda and the Public Mind
The term 'propaganda' faced conceptual extinction because it had become an anachronism. How could a cynical, media-literate cadre ever respond to its histrionic excess as earlier, more naive generations had done? The word had disappeared because the reality it signified was apparently no more. Yet ideas do not die, they merely hibernate. From the taunting videos of Osama bin Laden to the euphorias of the embedded journalist, from the lucid rhetoric of the anti-globalisation movement to the empire of spin to the scalding polemics of U.S. campaign advertising, propaganda is back, centre-stage. What other literary formula might we use to evoke the theatre of imagery which we inhabit today? The whirligig of fashion applies to concepts as well as clothes.
NICHOLAS J. O'SHAUGHNESSY
Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction
All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings.
ALDOUS HUXLEY
"Pacifism and Philosophy"
If our current reality is indeed socially constructed ... then this must imply a formative role for communication, and for propaganda as a sub-set of communication.
NICHOLAS J. O'SHAUGHNESSY
Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction
The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses. That this has not been understood by those among us whose wits are supposed to have been sharpened to the highest pitch is only another proof of their vanity and mental inertia.
ADOLF HITLER
Mein Kampf
You may imagine yourself unaffected by propaganda, but the person who thinks himself above propaganda is quite possibly its creature.
BRIAN ANSE PATRICK
The Ten Commandments of Propaganda