Thomas Pynchon Quotes

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

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.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

I know propaganda when I see it, and I can speak with authority on it.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

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

We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them.

The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

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

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

The right can distort anything it wants.

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

The spin overwhelms the substance. That's very clearly what happened.

My first husband would never make up his mind in less than five years, so I used to get him to think that whatever course of action needed to be taken was his idea. Then he'd go right ahead.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catchwords, devised to flatter rather than instruct.

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