Quotes About Influence

Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything - that's part of how you teach people they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, and diverted to consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.

People tend to rally around power.

The trick is not to be isolated?if you're isolated, like Winston Smith in 1984, then sooner or later you're going to break, as he finally broke. That was the point of Orwell's story. In fact, the whole tradition of popular control has been exactly that: to keep people isolated, because if you can keep them isolated enough, you can get them to believe anything. But when people get together, all sorts of things are possible.

Within the reigning social order, the general public must remain an object of manipulation, not a participant in thought, debate, and decision.

Choice of sources can shield extreme bias behind a façade of objectivity.

there has been a deepening recognition among elites in the West that as you begin to lose the power to control people by force, you have to start to control what they think. And in the United States, that recognition has reached its apogee.

Large corporations have resources to influence media and overwhelm the political process, and do so accordingly.

One should attend carefully to the fear and desperation of the powerful. They understand very well the potential reach of the ultimate weapon, and only hope that those who seek a more free and just world will not gain the same understanding and put it effectively to use.

Bir grup güçlendikçe, kendi ç?karlar?na hizmet edebilecek politikac?lar? ön plana ç?kar?r.

The idea that we must choose between the method of winning hearts and minds and the method of shaping behavior presumes that we have the right to choose at all. This is to grant us a right that we would surely accord to no other power. Yet the overwhelming body of American scholarship accords us this right.

the way they put it, we as a society have decided not to modify the society but to modify the children.

The public must be reduced to passivity in the political realm, but for submissiveness to become a reliable trait, it must be entrenched in the realm of belief as well.

I think that's a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

One of the functions that things like professional sports play, in our society and others, is to offer an area to deflect people's attention from things that matter, so that the people in power can do what matters without public interference.

If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there. Corporations aren't going to go home and join the PTA. They are going to run things.

international community"—a technical term referring to the U.S. government and whoever goes along with it.

Small differences in a system of great power can have enormous consequences. [Source: Al Jazeera 'Upfront' interview]

Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.

intellectuals are typically privileged; privilege yields opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibilities. An individual then has choices.

But for another thing, there's no law of nature which says that control over capital has to be in a few hands?that's like saying that political power has to be in a few hands. Why? There wasn't a law that said that the king and the nobles had to run everything, and there isn't a law that says that corporate owners and managers have to run everything either. These are social arrangements. They developed historically, they can be changed historically

the distinguished Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his text American Politics, observes that power must remain invisible if it is to be effective: "The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen. Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate.

There's a very simple point about arithmetic—if you happen to be in a swing state, a state where the outcome is indefinite, and you don't vote for, say, Clinton, that's equivalent to voting for Trump. That's arithmetic.