Steven Levitt Quotes

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

If we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power.

The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.

Information is currency. ... Power is a place as well as a verb; it is inside the information tent.

The Freedom of Information Act isn’t used, for the most part, by the people. It’s used by Journalists … The information is not sought to bestow knowledge upon the people. It is used as a weapon.

If you want to edify, you have to entertain.

Power comes through public persuasion.

Whoever controls the question determines the answer.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

We are not the "free thinkers" we think we are. What we eat unavoidably impacts our physiology; the information we consume inevitably affects our opinions and perspectives. You cannot eat junk food with impunity; you cannot consume information without consequences.

I was in college for organizational communication and politics because I was just fascinated by influence. I wondered how people have influence, not because I wanted to inspire the world - yet.

I got really good at negotiating from a place of weakness.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

If you think of data as kind of an x-ray of our soul, it's this window into our minds that the company has possessed. It's a very, very powerful x-ray for them to hold because the more that you understand about somebody, the easier it is to manipulate them.

Let me go back to a fundamental thing we all used to agree on: information is power. That's why we became journalists in the first place.

Television has power.

[The currency of being celebrity] used to be only the elect had any manna in the information society and everyone else was a consumer.

You can't make the people do what you want them to do. You've got to get everybody to see what you seein' or you gonna be a damn fool.

[T]here may be some truth in that if the Arabs have some complaints about my policy towards Israel, they have to realize that the Jews in the U. S. control the entire information and propaganda machine, the large newspapers, the motion pictures, radio and television, and the big companies, and there is a force that we have to take into consideration.

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.

There's a fine line between information and propaganda.

Take Google - I can use it, you can use it, anyone else can use it, but we all know its designed so that private power can influence significantly how you access it.