David Harsanyi Quotes

Propaganda today relies for the most part on repetition of catchwords that leaders wish listeners to accept on their face value without critical scrutiny, suppression of information that debates those catchwords, and rationalization of their cause to foment passions in the interest of the state or party.

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.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.

If you watch the news, you see politicians use human vulnerabilities to get in and earn people's trust.

The ability to convince people of the wackiest notions - and both parties can do it - it's part of the dumbing down of America that's really highly problematic.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

What does democracy come down to? The persuasive power of slogans invented by wily self-seeking politicians.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

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

In the age of Trump, we need to be aware of emotional rhetoric and its power regardless of whether or not it's based in fact.

I never believe any politician talking about popular culture.

You know, when George Bush talks about freedom not being America's gift to world but God's gift to all humankind, it smells like market testing to me.

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

It's all a sham: I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.

Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.

Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths.

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

The Left Elite only pretend to be concerned about what's best for everyone else because it is the most effective way to manipulate you and your children into their abyss.

To cover politics in Washington allows you to live in the very, very wide gap between what the actual truth is, and how people are trying to manipulate the truth. They speak in the language of spin, obsequiousness, obfuscation. The meta of politics is just this endless source of material that can shed light on the psychology of the process.

That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified.

The delusion of the people is necessary to the dominant party. I see the extent to which that delusion has been already carried, and I see there is no length to which it may not be pushed by a party in possession of the revenues and the legal authorities of the United States

Critics intend on changing the balance of public opinion and of political power.

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.