John Pilger Quotes

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.

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

The former ruling class kept the community of actors in ignorance by means of various lies.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

The delusion of the people is necessary to the dominant party. I see the extent to which that delusion has been already carried, and I see there is no length to which it may not be pushed by a party in possession of the revenues and the legal authorities of the United States

The ignorant classes had been taught to believe that certain words such as "sovereignty," "protection," and so forth had peculiar meanings disastrous to their welfare and significant of future political domination, like that from which they had been recently freed.

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

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

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

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

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.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.

When my body is covered and disappears, it's not about the relationship between me and the wall, but the relationship between me as an individual and those slogans which are used to fool the public.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. I ask, in my writing, 'What is real?' Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

No section of the American populace has been more completely deceived by the forces interested in keeping the truth from the people than America's youth.

The spin overwhelms the substance. That's very clearly what happened.

When a wrong thought is told a thousand times and impressed on one’s brain, one starts feeling the falsehood as truth. Similarly if the mind of slave is hammered of slavery, he starts enjoying his slavery

All political power is primarily an illusion …. Mirrors and blue smoke …

The people wish to be deceived; let them be deceived.