Margaret Halsey Quotes

The best story is the story that gets to the most people.

Pure truth cannot be assimilated by the crowd; it must be communicated by contagion.

If you are to reach masses of people in this world, you must do it by a sign language. Whether your vehicle be commerce, literature, or politics, you can do nothing but raise signals, and make motions to the people.

If I want to tell a story to 10 people, I don't need a star. If I want to tell it to 10,000 people, the best case scenario is you get an actor and a star.

Mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive independently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for his social ease with what used to be called his soul - his discriminations, his uniqueness, his psychic energy, his self.

In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

Preventing the new generation from changing in any deep way is what most societies require of their educators.

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

To be a bestseller is not necessarily a measure of quality, but it is a measure of communication.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.

Think how much better it is to criticize conventional customs if you yourself live up to them, scrupulously.

If you stand up to the human race you lose something called their 'goodwill'; if you kowtow to them you gain ... their permission to continue kowtowing.

Television is the quickest form of recognition in the world.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

Realizing that people should lie when they do makes me a little more open-minded, a little more tolerant, when my child or my partner lies.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong.

Was there ever a time when the majority was right?

The power of the media is really the only new issue in the last 50 years, probably.

There are crimes which no one would commit as an individual which he willingly and bravely commits when acting in the name of his society, because he has been (too easily) convinced that evil is entirely different when it is done 'for the common good.'...one might point to the way in which racial hatreds and even persecution are admitted by people who consider themselves, and perhaps in some sense are, kind, tolerant, civilized and even humane.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't go out to football games and drink beer and have a good time, I do it myself. But, at the same time, people are so apathetic and that shows me that they don't care about themselves. They have no self-image. Their image is projected to them via the television and that is where they make decisions about who they are according to what the public says they ought to be.

Evil…doesn’t mean doing things that have bad consequences for people. It means private thoughts and actions that are not to “the Christian majority’s” private liking.

In youth, it is common to measure right and wrong by the opinion of the world, and in age, to act without any measure but interest, and to lose shame without substituting virtue.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.