Philip K. Dick Quotes

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

Power comes through public persuasion.

A word after a word after a word is power.

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.

Society is made of words, whose meanings the powerful control, or try to.

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.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

You can say anything if enough people will listen.

Part of politics is redundancy. You’ve got to say the same thing over and over even if you get tired of it…not everyone has heard it.

Propaganda as a mere tool is no more moral or immoral than a pump handle....the only effective weapon against propaganda on behalf of one policy seems to be propaganda on behalf of an alternative.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

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.

Power can shape 'truth,' but not forever.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

It's much easier to gain control over a mass population when you pit them against each other.

Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.

I love the English language. Words have power.

Those in power always try to distort reality, to suit their needs and keep things safe.

The most political decision you make is where you direct people's eyes. In other words, what you show people, day in and day out, is political...And the most politically indoctrinating thing you can do to a human being is to show him, every day, that there can be no change.

The pen is mightier than the sword, but the tongue is mightier than them both put together.

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent--all depending on who wields it and how.

The turn of a sentence has decided the fate of many a friendship, and, for aught that we know, the fate of many a kingdom.

Once we recognize the power of propaganda, we need to ask whether its exercise is consistent with those democratic ideals to which lip-service is commonly accorded.