Harry S. Truman Quotes

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.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. I have a hard time listening to any speech. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap.

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

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

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

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.

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

Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

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

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

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

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

In politics where immediate success is attained by saying what people can be made to believe, rather than what is demonstrably true, accent is generally placed on the desirable rather than on the possible.

The Politician uses the language of diplomacy of which he is a master, and it consists in telling some of the truth without necessarily exhausting it.

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

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.

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

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

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.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.

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.