George Santayana Quotes

The art of advertising - untruthfulness combined with repetition.

The Wizard's First Rule: People are stupid; given proper motivation almost anyone will believe almost anything.

I am sick of deconstructing their propaganda, because it's pretty much the same as it's always been. It's just repeating something over and over again until we believe it and we hope that you believe it.

I love advertising because I love lying.

There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.

Unfortunately, propaganda works.

In my firm, we dealt in lies. Advertising is that ... the skilful use of the truth to mislead, to spoil, to debase.

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 ... Who knows what use they’ll make of you? Maybe you’ll help them to persuade people to buy things they don’t need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them.

Kids, Madison Avenue is lying to you. Your parents are lying to you. The president is lying to you.

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

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

I can not think of any circumstances in which advertising would not be an evil.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

When people see political ads, they think someone's lying to them.

Advertising is legalized lying.

When a wrong thought is told a thousand times and impressed on one’s brain, one starts feeling the falsehood as truth. Similarly if the mind of slave is hammered of slavery, he starts enjoying his slavery

The primitive simplicity of their [the masses'] minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell big ones.

Propaganda must not serve the truth, especially insofar as it might bring out something favorable to the opponent.... The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.

We may employ artifice to deceive a rival, anything against our enemies.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. […] We're used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.

People are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one.

The power of propaganda is to say something enough times that it becomes the Big Lie.

A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak.