Mark Pagel Quotes

People watch movies - and it's vague ideas, it's vague notions, but people pick up on these things, that they are supposed to think certain ways or that they're not supposed to think, basically, and they don't.

You'd just be amazed what people will do. You really would. And not crazy people. Ostensibly normal people. When the right person touches the right button in someone, you can get them to do almost anything.

The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are.

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.

Why does your mind conform? Have you ever asked? Are you aware that you are conforming to a pattern? It doesn't matter what that pattern is, whether you have established a pattern for yourself or it has been established for you.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

Beware, all too often we say what we hear others say. We think what we are told that we think. We see what we are permitted to see. Worse, we see what we are told that we see.

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.

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.

Buy, buy, buy, buy! They want to grab you and trap you and turn you into little Elizabeth Hurleys.

People can undergo a sudden change of thinking and loyalties under threat of death or intense social pressure and isolation from friends and family.

Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

What is terrifying is the ability, through mass brainwashing or propaganda, to change normal human instinct, which does not necessarily contain very much hatred.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

All language is a popularity contest.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

My message isn't perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

If I get ‘em by the short and curlies, the hearts and minds will follow.

We must form men so that they can only will what we wish them to will.

A democracy doesn’t use force to control its citizens; it uses propaganda instead.

Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

We're often too entrenched in existing structures and are so primed to think that if we grew up with the values and the norms, they have to be correct.

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.

Reviews condition people. At the end of the day, a lot of human minds are malleable. They can be easily shaped with strong words.