Erica Jong Quotes

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

Wordsmiths who serve established power...castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim.

The establishment and their media enablers will control over America through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe, and morally deformed.

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.

That's the heart of it: My shows were not that controversial with the American people. They were controversial with the people who think for the American people.

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 real violence is committed in the writing of history, the records of the legal system, the reporting of news, through the manipulation of social contracts, and the control of information.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.

Fair and balanced is doublespeak for bite-out-chunks-of-truth until only irrelevancy is left, byte-sized, entertaining irrelevancy

Give people control of the media and they will use it. Don’t give them control and you will lose it.

They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness.

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority.

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to.

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 - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power.

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Politics won't allow for the truth.

Those in power always try to distort reality, to suit their needs and keep things safe.

In North Koreans, the moment we are born, we don't know there's another life existing outside of our country. The regime always told us all the bad things about the outside world, describing America as full of thieves, all human scum, beggars, everyday people dying on the streets and hospitals.