Quotes on Propaganda

Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

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

If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.

If an essay has a 'motive,' it is linked more to happenstance and opportunity than to the driven will. A genuine essay is not a doctrinaire tract or a propaganda effort or a broadside.

It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.

So much of the news was invented for propaganda.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

Novels can change attitudes. Maybe we should speak quietly otherwise politicians will use novels as propaganda.

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

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

U.S. Government propaganda tries to give the impression that aerial bombardment achieves near-surgical accuracy, so that military targets can be destroyed with minimal effect on civilians. Technical documents give a different picture.

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have.

In 1984, George Orwell wrote of a world where the only colour to be found was in the propaganda posters. Such is the case in North Korea. Images of Kim Il-sung are depicted in vivid colours. Rays of yellow and orange emanate from his face: he is the sun.

What can we put into the hands of people under oppressive regimes to help them? For me, a big part of it is information, knowledge - the ability to defeat propaganda by understanding it.

There is not a special imposition on writers to be activists. All that does is encourage writers to write propaganda. Propaganda can be written by anybody, including dictators.

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

If you're using comedy to shame people for getting informed and questioning authority, you're not doing comedy, you're doing propaganda, 'cause comedy is supposed to poke holes in the status quo and challenge authority and question authority.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.