Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes

The public are not stupid.

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

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.

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.

I think, increasingly, despite what we are being told is an ever more open world of communication, there is a terrible alienation in the ordinary man between what he is being told and what he secretly believes.

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

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

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

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.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

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

Propaganda today relies for the most part on repetition of catchwords that leaders wish listeners to accept on their face value without critical scrutiny, suppression of information that debates those catchwords, and rationalization of their cause to foment passions in the interest of the state or party.

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

A democracy becomes ungovernable if a substantial portion of the population lives in an alternative reality…. How do you have a rational conversation about President Obama’s policies of he believes that Obama is a spy for Iran.

We live in an age where people can not only choose their own sources, but they can choose their own facts.

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

In the age of Trump, we need to be aware of emotional rhetoric and its power regardless of whether or not it's based in fact.

We Liberals like to think our thoughts aren't controlled. We pride ourselves on our independent thinking. We know we shouldn't believe everything we read. We realize the media is skewed, we know it's owned by a small group of people, we realize it's biased, etc.