Henry A. Wallace Quotes

A wartime Minister of Information is compelled, in the national interest, to such continuous acts of duplicity that even his natural hair must grow to resemble a wig.

Vladimir Putin understood, from the Communist era when he was a KGB officer, that the Russian propaganda system of targeting Western media - that in the digital world, you could easily pull the Western media around by a nose ring.

Every time I talk to somebody about Putin, it's like, 'But isn't he vastly popular?' Is that really the most important question? I mean, we can unpack his popularity. I think it's manufactured. I think it's manufactured through totalitarian mechanisms.

The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defense correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons.

China's censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated.

In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.

For governments at war, the media is an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.

It's all a sham: I have seen, and I know firsthand, indeed from my own pen, how the organized Right has sabotaged not only journalism but also democracy and truth.

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship.

We have to stop the propaganda, the shameful propaganda used by Kremlin to rehabilitate these old types.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.

Among the calamities of war, may he justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.

The shooting war is over, here! ... with one phase over I am now up to my neck on the control phase. We will rigidly control all newspapers, films theatre, radio music, etc., in Germany! My division now publishes 8 newspapers in Germany, with 1,000,000 circulation and sends 2 million plus language papers each day by air for displaced persons and POWs. Biggest newspaper enterprise in the world.

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

What's public is propaganda, what's secret is serious.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

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

In time of war, truth is always replaced by propaganda.

The right-wing wants to destroy all the media and replace it with their propaganda.

It's not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.

The media is in charge of what you think. They're in charge of what you know and don't know. And any challenge to that, like alternative media or a president with direct access to the audience and doesn't need them, is a threat.

Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play.