David Perlmutter Quotes

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.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

If the government did a good job of publicizing this information, my products wouldn't sell.

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

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.

In every war zone that I've been in, there has been a reality and then there has been the public perception of why the war was being fought. In every crisis, the issues have been far more complex than the public has been allowed to know.

The public are not stupid.

What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

Commercial television has underestimated the intelligence of the public.

Allegations become facts, and facts become truth in the eyes of the public, whether they are true or not.

None of us should play party to any corporate warfare. We cannot become pawns in the hands of corporate giants' warfare to constantly bully the government, to throw misinformation to the public, tell part-truth and part-story to the public.

We buy into all kinds of lies that are sold to us from advertising to Fox news or from the Vatican to Goldman Sachs.

In the corporate-owned media, men dressed like Ronald Reagan and women dressed like Rita Hayworth disseminate grotesque exaggerations and gossip in authoritative tones.

A culture cannot lie down with dogs and not become utterly infested with fleas. The dogs, in this case, are the mongrel media and the corporate overlords who have grown fat on manufactured controversy and fear mongering.

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

Advertising is the genie which is transforming America into a place of comfort, luxury and ease for millions.

Although the Internet could be making all of us smarter, it makes many of us stupider, because it's not just a magnet for the curious. It's a sinkhole for the gullible.

Those of our people who do not study history can be duped into believing anything.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

There is no part of the means placed in the hands of the Executive which might be used with greater effect for unhallowed purposes than the control of the public press.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Facts are a thing of the past. Americans may find it impossible to debate politics clearly because of a lack of agreement on basic matters of fact: that was certainly the case in this yea'rs Presidential election [2016]. And no one has taken more advantage of this than Donal;d Trump ... Trump and his talking heads didn't create this world. It is the result of decadews-long stategy devised devised by a numbe of public affairs practitioners who recognized that lies were the most potent weapoin in the fight against progress,

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

Rush Limbaugh makes money getting simpleminded people to feel good about their intellectually undernourished brain spasms. He's very good at it, and I scarcely believe a fraction of what he says.