Jacques Ellul Quotes

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. 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.

In Russia, as well as everywhere else, the true and lasting power is that of public opinion, and of those who know how to influence it.

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.

The media do strange things.

The media is so powerful.

Public opinion can be influential, the media can be influential.

There's no denying that television is one of the most powerful propaganda media we've ever invented.

The media can be a really strong vehicle.

We can learn a lot from these Bolsheviks—most of all in the use of propaganda.

I set the propaganda machine in motion. Now we will see what the apparatus will do.

With the instrument of radio you can make public opinion. Perhaps even conquer a country.

Give me the writing of a nation's advertising and propaganda, and I care not who governs its politics.

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.

Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.

The media have disproportionate control of the information in our society.

Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilized is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are, you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.

If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

… propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients. The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers. he echoes their innermost feelings.

The media has for us a fundamental priority because it is a weapon for the ideological struggle and a weapon to express to the people the hope that we all have.

The media. It sounds like a convention of spiritualists.

It's hard not to look at the road of the media and how the media is a big part of painting a picture for public opinion.

The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass. It is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.

Manipulation is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.

History must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts over the future of the nation.