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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.
-Jean Anouilh
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
-Hannah Arendt
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It was characteristic of the rise of the Nazi movement in Germany and of the Communist movements in Europe after 1930 that they recruited their members from this mass of apparently indifferent people whom all other parties had given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been
-Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism, ch. 10, Harcourt (1951)
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Derived from this celebrated society for propagating the faith, the name propaganda is applied in modern political language as a term of reproach to secret associations for the spread of opinions and principles which are viewed by most governments with horror and aversion.
-W.T. Brande
from a dictionary of science, literature, and art, 1842
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The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda.
-Martin Buber
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All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
-Noam Chomsky
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Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.
-James B. Conant
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Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.
-Francis Macdonald Cornford
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Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.
-Elizabeth Drew
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Double-thought: as you believe things that should be self-contradictory. This is generally the result of some kind of propaganda.
-James Dye
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All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. 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.
-Terry Eagleton
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We have made the Reich by propaganda.
-Paul Joseph Goebbels
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Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.
-Hermann Goering
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Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.
-Eric Hoffer
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Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.
-Hubert Humphrey
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Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking.
-William Mather Lewis
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The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.
-G. C. (Georg Christoph) Lichtenberg
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Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant fundsdemanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.
-General Douglas MacArthur
A Soldier Speaks: Public Papers and Speeches of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur (1965)
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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.
-Marshall McLuhan
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He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.
-Joost Meerloo
The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing
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Propaganda replaces moral philosophy.
-Hans J. Morgenthau
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Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?
-Bertrand Russell
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A propagandist is a specialist in selling attitudes and opinions.
-Hans Speier
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But when a Man
-Jonathan Swift
The Tale of a Tub
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Books about Propaganda
