Frank Zappa Quotes

I hate television, but that's me. It's like sucking your thumb. It's a wonderful thing for keeping the masses enslaved.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

Shut up! Go back to bed, America. Your government is in control. Here's Love Connection. Watch this and get fat and stupid.

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.

There's no denying that television is one of the most powerful propaganda media we've ever invented.

Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.

The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.

If you really think about it, when watching television, you have product placement all the time.

Don't let anyone turn you into a slave. You're a slave if you let the media tell you that sports and entertainment are more important than developing your brain.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

Television is an instrument which can paralyze this country.

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.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

The journalistic traits that are valued on TV and radio talk shows are destructive to democracy.

History must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts over the future of the nation.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

The men who run the Eisenhower Administration evidently believe that the minds of Americans can be manipulated by shows, slogans and the arts of advertising … The men who run the Eisenhower Administration evidently believe that the minds of Americans can be manipulated by shows, slogans and the arts of advertising

Nearly every day on the television set the hero cop breaks into the bad guy’s house and beats a confession out of him and we cheer on the cop. Propaganda smears our clear vision. It causes us to accept the diminishment of our constitutional protections as something to be lauded — after all, the cop was protecting us.

Television is hypnotic, and it hides among the furniture of your living room. It doesn't reveal itself, but it distorts everything.

We're learning a tremendous amount of propaganda from television and the Internet.

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

TV and film are always slipping in political messages, not ones designed to bring us together but to divide us.

It's insidious how Hollywood warps your values without you even realizing that it's happening to you. You get a little whiff of success and it whets your appetite, and before you know it you're going right down the road they've laid out for you.

Pop culture or advertising doesn't work perfectly. No one is watching and mindlessly accepting every part of the narrative or ideology.

I really just drew off of where we are now, with reality TV. You can't help but see a lot of it. You choose to watch some, but with some, you just can't help but hear it and see it. It's just piercing in your brain. That piercing is what I was tapping into , with whatever they were doing to pierce into the minds of everybody. It takes a certain kind of person to shut your mind off to the consequences and just try to get results. That's what I was going for - results.