The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.

In modern times sound policy-making must often come to grips with numbers.

There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.

Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

Once we recognize the power of propaganda, we need to ask whether its exercise is consistent with those democratic ideals to which lip-service is commonly accorded.

The specific media may change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia.