Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear—kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor—with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
—Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964) American Military Leader
Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
—Eric Hoffer (1902–83) American Philosopher, Author
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.
—William Mather Lewis
The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
Propaganda replaces moral philosophy.
—Hans Morgenthau (1904–80) German-American Political Scientist
All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. 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
The most dangerous untruths are truths moderately distorted.
—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99) German Philosopher, Physicist
It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been
—Hannah Arendt (1906–75) German-American Philosopher, Political Theorist
Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.
—Hubert Humphrey (1911–78) American Head of State, Politician
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.
—Jean Anouilh (1910–87) French Dramatist
Some of mankind’s most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.
—James Bryant Conant (1893–1978) American Chemist, Educator
The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
—Martin Buber (1878–1965) Austrian Jewish Theologian, Philosopher, Novelist
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
—Hannah Arendt (1906–75) German-American Philosopher, Political Theorist
But when a Man
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Irish Satirist
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
—Noam Chomsky (b.1928) American Linguist, Social Critic
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