Quotes About Propaganda

It is an absurd fiction that the churches are useful. They are nothing more than propaganda centers for superstitious faiths and doctrines. Church members have a right to believe in and propagate their various doctrines. But they should pay every item of the cost, of this propaganda, including fair taxation for all church property.

I never wished to be a politician, and I despise them. I've also wrestled with it over the years, and I deeply dislike propaganda. And all art that is about propaganda, no matter how wonderful it's cause may be, I think is morally wrong. That's a major theme of my work. I don't want to control how people think; I want to show them how they are controlled by pictures.

If writing with a goal - whether it be evangelistic, apologetic, or didactic - implies propaganda, then all recorded history is propaganda. . . a work shouldn't be dismissed simply because of the strong convictions of the writer. Should we discount the facticity or reliability of the accounts of Nazi concentration camp survivors simply because they passionately recount their story?

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.

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

But the frightening aspect is that it's part of a larger effort from the Pentagon to tear down the wall between public affairs and propaganda, and essentially say there is no difference between information operations, public affairs and psychological operations. It's all one and the same. They have a new name for that too, it's called Information Engagement.

All was there-the programme of German resurrection, the technique of party propaganda; the plan for combating Marxism; the concept of a National-Socialist State; the rightful position of Germany at the summit ofthe world. Here was the new Koran of faith and war: turgid, verbose, shapeless, but pregnant with its message.

Ask yourself why totalitarian dictatorships find it necessary to pour money and effort into propaganda for their own helpless, chained, gagged slaves, who have no means of protest or defense. The answer is that even the humblest peasant or the lowest savage would rise in blind rebellion, were he to realize that he is being immolated, not to some incomprehensible noble purpose, but to plain, naked human evil.

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. 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.

I remember Nazi election propaganda posters showing a hateful Jewish face with crooked nose.

I was all for setting up a separate Jewish state in Madagascar or Palestine or someplace, but not to exterminate them. Besides, by exterminating 4 million Jews - they say 5 or 6 million at this trial, but that is all propaganda, I am sure it wasn't more than 4.5 million - they have made martyrs out of those Jews. For example, because of the extermination of these Jews, anti-Semitism has been set back many years in certain foreign countries where it had been making good progress.

As has been reported, and is unmistakably evident to all but the most naïve, federal employees have been ordered to exploit this crisis, to make the government shutdown as uncomfortable as they can. The White House is actively soliciting complaints from the general public on 'how the government shutdown has affected you.' These testimonies are tools sought for the propaganda kit; the better to agitate with.

The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist."

Are there no American citizens sympathizing with whiteguard emigres who conduct propaganda in favor of capitalism, against the Soviets? Then what does the point involve? The point is not to assist these persons, not to finance their activities. The point is that officials of both countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of the other country.

Conceit of the anti-gay law in Russia is to protect children, then the people who have the most to fear are LGBT parents. And sure enough, in conjunction with the homosexual propaganda law, they instituted a ban on adoptions by same-sex couples, or single people from countries where same-sex marriage is legal. That has very scary potential for any LGBT person with adopted kids, because Russian courts practice this particular legal concept called "annulment of adoption." So an adopted child is never exactly the same as a biological child, even if he or she was adopted ten years ago.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

Unfortunately, propaganda works.

That's because of everything the public interest and the media interest is focused on: What did Donald Trump know and when did he know it? Whether there was cooperation with the Russians. I don't mean to say that's a distraction or we shouldn't follow it up. But the underlying story of the Russians trying to subvert our democracy, both through propaganda, planted stories, manipulation of social media and through direct efforts to infiltrate our state election system, is really an enormously significant event. And it's not over.

when the German propaganda tries to be winsome it is like a clown with homicidal mania - ludicrous and terrifying both at once.

Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.

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.

The idea to use backpacks came from my visit to Sichuan after the earthquake in May 2008. During the earthquake many schools collapsed. Thousands of young students lost their lives, and you could see bags and study material everywhere. Then you realize individual life, media, and the lives of the students are serving very different purposes. The lives of the students disappeared within the state propaganda, and very soon everybody will forget everything.

The modern susceptibility to conformity and obedience to authority indicates that the truth endorsed by authority is likely to be accepted as such by a majority of people, who are innately obedient to authority. This obedience-truth will then become a consensus-truth accepted by many individuals unable to stand alone against the majority. In this way, the truth promulgated by the propaganda system - however irrational - stands a good chance of becoming the consensus, and may come to seem self-evident common sense.

The Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the raising of Lazarus, even the Old Testament miracles, all are freely used for religious propaganda, and they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children

[the difference between the old and the new education being] in a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

All of the government's monetary, economic and political power, as well as its extensive propaganda machinery, will be enlisted in a constant battle to drive down the price of gold - but in the absence of any fundamental change in the nation's monetary, fiscal, and economic direction, simply regard any major retreat in the price of gold as an unexpected buying opportunity.

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.

Creating whole departments of ethnic, gender, and other 'studies' was part of the price of academic peace. All too often, these 'studies' are about propaganda rather than serious education.

I grew up during the Communist time. When I was a student and I especially wanted to play rock, that was a problem for all rock musicians in the Soviet Union. My friends liked it, but all the Communist officials, bureaucrats, teachers, didn't like this. There was very powerful propaganda against capitalism and the Western ideology. Everything that was connected to the West - rock music, jeans, long hair, loud music - everything was not allowed. But luckily that's now in the past. I hope.

Even with the help of anti-Russian propaganda in the mass media, Germany has not succeeded in damaging this sympathy.

The U.S. public is depoliticised, poorly informed on foreign affairs... and strongly patriotic in the face of a struggle with another Hitler. Even though the public is normally averse to war, even with modest propaganda efforts... the public can be quickly transformed into enthusiastic supporters of war.

Before I went to Escuela Caribe, my parents showed me the school's brochures featuring smiling kids at the beach or on horseback. The propaganda was greatly appealing to a kid from rural Indiana who hated her high school anyway. I also got reassurances that I could return if I didn't like it. But shortly after the gates closed behind me, I learned I'd been deceived; the beach was far away and I couldn't return home until I'd completed the program.

Muslims are the primary victims of ISIS. Muslims are the ones who want to do the most to defeat this ideology. It's important that we don't do their propaganda for them, by giving them the legitimacy that they crave.

I am sick of deconstructing their propaganda, because it's pretty much the same as it's always been. It's just repeating something over and over again until we believe it and we hope that you believe it.

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.

For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade.

They [prisons] are not designed to rehabilitate the - the inmate, though the, the public propaganda is that this is their function.

It is no longer enough to simply read and write. Students must also become literate in the understanding of visual images. Our children must learn how to spot a stereotype, isolate a social cliche, and distinguish facts from propaganda, analysis from banter and important news from coverage.

The conservative side of our political spectrum has had an outsized voice over the last few years. I think especially since the establishment of Fox News, which has created an echo chamber in which people just hear the same ideas repeated ad infinitum. And you know, it's just basic advertising, basically. You hear the same idea over and over again. Or you can call it propaganda if you like.

It's only when journalists understand the role they play in this propaganda, it's only when they realize they can't be both independent, honest journalists and agents of power, that things will begin to change.

The United States is not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system.

In India you don't find propaganda against Pakistan. During the war there was a little of it, naturally, but even during the war we were able to control it. In fact the Pakistanis were astonished by this. There were prisoners in the camp hospitals who exclaimed, 'What? You're a Hindu doctor and you want to cure me?'

I found that I loved producing that kind of propaganda and I loved the power that a few students with a Macintosh computer could wield. I was hooked on communications at that point.

It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression.

We have been brainwashed by school, indoctrinated by industrial propaganda, and mesmerized by the popular media into believing that compliance is not only safe but right and necessary.

The best goal for propaganda analysis is to develop such an understanding of the phenomenon that it will no longer be profitable for people to engage in it.