Penn Jillette Quotes

When the state or federal government control the education of all of our children, they have the dangerous and illegitimate monopoly to control and influence the thought process of our citizens.

When dictators feel their support slipping among adults, it is not unusual for them to alter school textbooks in hope of enlisting impressionable youths in their cause.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business… the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.

A country whose population has been trained to accept the government's word and to shun those who question it is a country without liberty in its future.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media.

Part of the reason that the government's fear mongering is succeeding is because so many people are so ignorant, that it is easier for government to frighten people in submission.

The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry. With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages.

Those who want the Government to regulate matters of the mind and spirit are like men who are so afraid of being murdered that they commit suicide to avoid assassination.

When I was young, there was only one TV channel, sponsored by the government, and it only broadcast things like what the leader had for breakfast. There was no real media.

In any country, in any city, there will be political influence on what is said, what kind of images are to be projected and, yes, of course artists can be and are influenced by politicians.

China is building a model for how an authoritarian government can survive the Internet.

Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

If the communist party is controlling China, they represent China.

On the face of it, China has won the Olympics. But it is not China that has won, but the Communist party. The Chinese people have lost.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

The strategies and assumptions [of the propaganda model] are fundamentally contrary to a democratic model.... The goal of the propaganda model is simply to achieve efficient indoctrination, and it therefore tends to regard the assumptions of the democratic model as inconvenient obstacles to efficient communication.

The worst thing our Communists could do to us, and the thing we have most to fear from their activities, is that we should become like them.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and the war aims and operating plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. There is no more appalling caricature of freedom of thought. Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to want to think, and this they consider freedom.

Many people here are completely unsuitable for shaping public opinion. I am going to weed them out.

There is no real public opinion in Communist countries. They are ruled by an oligarchy.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

Fox Televison News is reaching Third Reich standards of media coverage of world affairs.

My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.

To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated at, regulated, docketed, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, weighed, censored, ordered about, by men who have neither the right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue. ...