Ferdinand Lassalle Quotes
If this newspaper pestilence shall continue for fifty years more, the intelligence of our people will be destroyed.... Hold fast and zealously, therefore, to the slogan I now ask you to make your own: hatred and contempt, death and destruction, of the press of today.
Ferdinand Lassalle, 1825-1864, Founder, German Social Democratic Party, Speech, September 26, 1863
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
In 1948 in the midst of the Red Scare the HUAC and its Senate counterpart had started to hound a former Assistant Secretary of State, Lawrence Duggan. Typical of the times, those who disagreed with Duggan’s political views anonymously leaked material to the press alleging that Duggan might have been a spy. The press had a feeding frenzy and Dugan committed suicide in the midst of the pressure. Most in Congress paused to contemplate the consequence of what was occurring. Even Richard M. Nixon regretted the “misunderstandings.” Dugan’s father, however, an old acquaintance of Edward R. Murrow, the then dean of American broadcasters, however primarily blamed the press for printing all the unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo.
Sherman felt that the newspapers of North and South fired up hatred of one side against the other and especially in the South, falsely reported the chances of the Confederacy and made rational Southerners who wanted to minimize the death and destruction to their people were made to feel like traitors and cowards.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Since so many politicians have lied to the public and the press, denials, the press is very suspicious of any denials. In this particular case they were concerned that this denial is stated in the present, but is not a denial about the past including the recent past. So they continued to press him.
Every President in recent times had been distressed with and critical of the press, not no President (or for that matter any senior government official or legislator) has ever used the famous Ibsen phrase enemy of the people or accused the major media outlets of being an enemy of the American citizens or the nation itself--of treason.
Ferdinand Lassalle was a Prussian-German jurist, philosopher, socialist and political activist best remembered as the initiator of the social democratic movement in Germany. "Lassalle was the first man in Germany, the first in Europe, who succeeded in organising a party of socialist action", or, as Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Lassalle managed to wrestle from history in two years of flaming agitation what needed many decades to come about." As agitator he coined the terms night-watchman state and iron law of wages.
