Harold D. Lasswell Quotes

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

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

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

In the struggle for power, propaganda is an instrument to be used by those who want to secure or retain power just as much as it is by those wanting to displace them.

Trump has a way of driving a message so people hear it.

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

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

The press is our chief ideological weapon.

I'm a bit of a propagandist.

I start looking for adjectives in news reporting, and if there are too many of them, if they're all sort of repeatedly designed to influence my thinking in a certain way, I start getting concerned. I'm leery of people trying to paint a picture in a certain way.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

You will not have to make war there only with arms, but also with public opinion

The greatest weapon in an ideological war is words.

The presentation of an issue can no longer be controlled.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So 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. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

Propaganda is bad when it comes from the enemy. It is good when it comes from us.

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

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.

Rhetoric, which is the use of language to inform or persuade, is very important in shaping public opinion. We are very easily fooled by language and how it is used by others.

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

All writing is a form of manipulation, of course, but you realize that a plain sentence can actually do so much.