Noam Chomsky Quotes

I set the propaganda machine in motion. Now we will see what the apparatus will do.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

We are going to have to endure an imperial media with a government by public opinion poll.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

Democratic societies can't force people. Therefore they have to control what they think.

The delusion of the people is necessary to the dominant party. I see the extent to which that delusion has been already carried, and I see there is no length to which it may not be pushed by a party in possession of the revenues and the legal authorities of the United States

Give me the writing of a nation's advertising and propaganda, and I care not who governs its politics.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized opinions and habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology.... Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

We have a free society, and the totalitarian states are dungeons. We have totally different methods of population control…. We can’t control people so we have to control what they think.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

Trump, in the crinkling of an eye, senses better than anyone the insecurity of people, that nobody knows whether anything is good or bad until they are told, and he is quite willing to tell them immediately.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology... Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions are generated.

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking - so it's no wonder so many politicians thrive in it.

Machiavelli had some cold tricks for people who wanted to be demagogues and wanted to take over the world.