Bill Hicks Quotes

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

Let me make the newspapers, and I care not what is preached in the pulpit or what is enacted in Congress.

Give people control of the media and they will use it. Don’t give them control and you will lose it.

If the media is a farce, why should you be the only one stuck with rules and restrictions?

The enemies of advertising are the enemies of freedom.

We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.

Today, the media dictatorship is becoming a substitute to military dictatorship. The big economic groups are using the media and decide who can speak, who the good guy is and who the bad guy is.

In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.

Every time you're exposed to advertising in America you're reminded that this country's most profitable business is still the manufacture, packaging, distribution, and marketing of bullshit. High-quality, grade-A, prime-cut, pure American bullshit.

The ultimate censorship is the flick of the dial.

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

You have to be down here in the States to realize just how tightly controlled the corporate media is and how much they practise Soviet-style censorship through creative omission.

As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society.

They have been talking about a dictatorship and they were right because there's a dictatorship and there's a government that has been fighting that dictatorship, the dictatorship of the media.

The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - 'indoctrination', we might say - exercised through the mass media.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

You can't get past the liberal press with a bucket of ink.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

My level of intervention in the press, trying to control stories, is zero. Subzero.

It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.