Tariq Ali Quotes

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.

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.

If you keep saying two plus two equals five over and over again, then that is what people are going to think. Maybe it does equal five if we keep changing the definition of what's normal and what's right and what's wrong.

You know, you can't make the people do what you want them to do.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

What I'd really like to control is not machines, but people.

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.

We lead them to believe that we are in complete control over every aspect of their lives.

Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

Power comes through public persuasion.

Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none.

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

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

It turns out we are all quite easily swayed if someone knows what they are doing - which is a great thing and a dangerous thing.

Power is being able to say complete and utter nonsense and have it be believed, powerlessness is where no matter how much cogent evidence and proof one has, to not be believed.

To persuade is more trouble than to dominate, and the powerful seldom take this trouble if they can avoid it.

Power is all. Another falsification; I do not tell how I gain or maintain it. I only record the ginger stroll through the vaguely fetid garden of its rewards.

Uninformed people can be easily manipulated.

Force rules the world-not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force.

There is power and there is power, my dear. My power can be vast, in the right places.

Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.

Power is not sufficient evidence of truth.

Power is not something that can be assumed or discarded at will like underwear.

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

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.