Oscar Wilde Quotes

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

It is not true that virtually all news in a totalitarian state is false.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

Every time you touch those who have power over the media, they seek to stop you.

It is a paradox that every dictator has climbed to power on the ladder of free speech. Immediately on attaining power each dictator has suppressed all free speech except his own.

One of the main ways that leadership stays in power is by, in various ways, convincing people that they should just let those who are in government govern: 'Trust us. Trust me. Just let us take care of things. Stay out of it.' Your opinions don't really matter. You are isolated. You are insignificant.

Numerous politicians have seized absolute power and muzzled the press. Never in history has the press seized absolute power and muzzled the politicians.

History’s most important lesson is that it has not been possible to make coercion compatible with the truth.

Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority.

Ever since Gutenberg, every dynasty, every political leader, every major religion, has recognized that to control the media is to have a powerful instrument for controlling the values and behavior of a population.

The National Socialist Party will prevent in the future, by force if necessary, all meetings and lectures which are likely to exercise a depressing influence on the German state.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

The media is controlled.

Technologies can be liberating, but it can also be a tool of coercion and control.

If the newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

Governments, existing primarily to protect and enhance capitalism, maintain their power through the use of technologies that control the populace - by bread or circuses, by war or schooling, by armies and police, all of which are enabled and empowered by technology. That is what we might call the stick part of capitalism, while the riches-for-the-few is the carrot.

If Big Brother (of Orwell's 1984) comes to America, he will not be a fearsome, foreboding figure with a heart-chilling, omnipresent glare as in 1984. He will come with a smile on his face, a quip on his lips, a wave to the crowd, and a press that (a) dutifully reports the suppressive measures he is taking to save the nation from internal chaos and foreign threat; and (b) gingerly questions whether he will be able to succeed.

We pretend to be a free society, and we pretend to be an adult society, but if you look at the facts, our news is just as contrived, and controlled as Pravda!

Whether it's Baidu or Chinese versions of YouTube or Sina or Sohu, Chinese Internet sites are getting daily directives from the government telling them what kinds of content they cannot allow on their site and what they need to delete.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.

China's censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.