Quotes About Propaganda

There are more martyrs to nonsense than truth, truth preferring missionaries.

Lenin rejected the idea of confining the revolutionary political struggle to a small group's conspiracy to seize power. The battle against absolutism should consist, he said, not in hatching plots but in training, disciplining, and organizing the workers, in propaganda and agitation among them.

On a questionnaire for a district party conference in Moscow in 1931, the one-time seminary dropout replied as follows to the question on schooling: "Kicked out of an orthodox theological seminary for Marxist propaganda."[144]

Since Lenin wrote as he spoke, his political writings had something of the compelling quality of his political speeches.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

There's very little that Idi Amin and Newt Gingrich have in common, but they both used words to shape how people think about things without regard for the truth.

Politicians play on our fears to manipulate us.

One of the most potent weapons in the battle for information, then, is giving out false information. As Winston Churchill said, "Truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.

Mao actually encouraged China's disagreements with the Soviet Union and the United States; without clear-cut enemies, he believed, his people would lose any sense of what Chinese Communism meant. A sharply defined enemy is a far stronger argument for your side than all the words you could possibly put together.

Truth was like any other material necessary for the making of war: it had to be beaten and bent and cut into the required shape.

Their souls were contagious. ... Bloodsuckers, spiders and vampires: that was what Lenin called them.

Of course, the Nazi movement was unique in terms of its killing machines and its policy of rounding up millions of people in order to systematically murder them. Nonetheless, the Nazi form of cultism has close resemblances to that of other political and religious groups, and leaves no doubt about cultist capacities for infinite murderousness.

In 1966, Mao and the Communist Party launched the "Cultural Revolution," inflicting a new hell on the Chinese people.

and others all agreed that Acts was pretty much an historical novel, much like the so-called Apocryphal Acts, and that it was written in the second century. There is virtually no historical value to it, but it is rich in edifying propaganda, its author having extensively rewritten sources that seem to include Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Josephus, and the Septuagint, creating a revisionist version of early Christianity in the golden age of its origin.

Authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths; totalitarians feel they must take the further step of compelling people to speak falsehoods.

George Orwell lo escribió en su libro 1984: "En un tiempo de engaño universal, decir la verdad es un acto revolucionario.

Wag the Dog became an international byword for fake wars staged to distract from domestic political problems. Without a doubt, it raised the level of cynicism, which is to say it raised the level of awareness that real events are directed and staged for their political impact.

When speculation becomes "truth," opinion "fact," and prejudice a "holy cause," demagoguery is not far behind.

A diferencia del estalinismo y otras dictaduras que se apropiaron, sin más, del poder, el nazismo se sustentó en una base popular.

Censorship is the child of fear the father of ignorance and the desperate weapon of fascists everywhere.

This is how terrorists get started, this kind of harmless fun.

If one plays on fear, takes away any remotely complicated ideas, and offers people a sense of confidence and right, one's followers will beat to death any enemy they are pointed at.

Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.

It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number.