Eric Hoffer Quotes

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

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

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.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

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

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

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.

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

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

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.

I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

A democracy doesn’t use force to control its citizens; it uses propaganda instead.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

People are more likely to believe a big lie than a small one.

The power of propaganda is to say something enough times that it becomes the Big Lie.

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.

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.

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.

Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.