Quotes About Influence

A deep-cover squad tried to infiltrate the far left by posing as politically radicalized Vietnam veterans well supplied with guns and drugs. Four or five of them liked their new lives so much that they never came back.

On July 6, he gave a speech to newspaper and television executives at the great columned building housing the National Archives and the original copy of the Constitution of the United States. "When I see those columns," he said, "I think of what happened to Greece and Rome." "They lost their will to live," he said. "They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The United States is reaching that period.

Freeh infuriated the White House almost every day for more than seven years. One case among many was the FBI's immense investigation into allegations that China's intelligence services had bought political influence at the White House through illegal campaign contributions.

He saw "new propaganda" emerging, and he said its goal was "not to convince or persuade, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted, passive and paranoid." RT, which received more than $1 billion a year from the Kremlin, began to fine-tune its English-language shows, targeting the fringes of the American political spectrum on the right and the left.

Under Cheney's direction, the United States moved to restore the powers of secret intelligence that had flourished for fifty-five years under J. Edgar Hoover. In public speeches, the president, the vice president, and the attorney general renewed the spirit of the Red raids. In top secret orders, they revived the techniques of surveillance that the FBI had used in the war on communism. The

When we first draw breath outside the womb, we inhale tiny particles of all that came before, both literally and figuratively. We are never merely individuals; we are never alone; we are always in the company of others, of the past, of history.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.

The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

any and all information that one consumes - pays attention to - will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction. That idea, in turn, has a very radical implication, for it suggests that sometimes we overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought.

the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated

like late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire—Verizon and AT&T (whose

we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid.

the mogul makes the medium: the imprint of the personality inevitably informs it, often no less than the technology underlying it. Turner

if everything is entrusted to a single mind, its inevitable subjective distortions will distort, if not altogether disable, the innovation process.

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It is in this context that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any question of free speech comes the question of "who controls the master switch.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. How

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It

Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically,

They didn't hide by day and only come out at night. They were people who held their communities together, bankers and merchants, lawyers and doctors, coaches and teachers, servants of God and shapers of opinion.

had yet to influence

Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history.

Most members of the incoming state legislature took orders from the hooded order, as did the majority of the congressional delegation.