Wendell Willkie Quotes

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catchwords, devised to flatter rather than instruct.

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

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

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong.

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

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

Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

A good portion of speaking will consist in knowing how to lie.

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things.

Campaigns exaggerate or oversimplify the truth because it’s effective.