Randal Marlin Quotes

You can persuade a man to believe almost anything provided he is clever enough, but it is much more difficult to persuade someone less clever.

Make converts to your own thoughts and opinions.

There should be a name for this, for the process whereby one knows one is being yanked and concedes it has been done successfully - that one is grateful to have been spun. In the theater, it is called the willing suspension of disbelief. That's what allows the play to make an impact on the audience: they have to be able to make believe that what's happening on the stage is really happening. Maybe to a degree it is a requirement for all political participation, all effective political communication, too.

You can only coax someone into the vortex from in the vortex.

The best way to compel weak-minded people to adopt our opinion, is to frighten them from all others, by magnifying their danger.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

Nevertheless, this type of propaganda has a special value, for it serves to convince those who sign the appeal, of the necessity for carrying on propaganda; so a corps of propagandists, if I may use the term, is thus trained.

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.

I set the propaganda machine in motion. Now we will see what the apparatus will do.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

Give me the writing of a nation's advertising and propaganda, and I care not who governs its politics.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

In Russia, as well as everywhere else, the true and lasting power is that of public opinion, and of those who know how to influence it.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

Aren't rumors great. Anyone can start them. They're a wonderful way to put out feelers. It's like getting the benefits of a publicist without paying one.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to.

There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.

We're so saturated with propaganda every way you look that we don't notice it. But when it isn't there, you notice.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

Don't try to convert the elderly person; circumvent him.

The intelligent, like the unintelligent, are responsive to propaganda.

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The greater the lie, the greater chance that it will be believed. All epoch-making events have been produced not by the written, but the spoken word.

Always win fools first. They talk much, and what they have once uttered they will stick to; whereas there is always time, up to the last moment, to bring before a wise man arguments that may entirely change his opinion.

That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.