Norman Angell Quotes

Though the Americans can be fooled, as they have been, and they can be propagandized, as they have been... But, as Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. But you can't fool all of the people all of the time." And so hope lies in the fact that little by little, even if the American people can be fooled, even if they continue to be fooled in the 2004 presidential election, they will gradually learn, as they have learned - for instance, in the Vietnam War and turned against the Vietnam War.

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.

Increasingly, people have very little tolerance for anything that smacks of propaganda.

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.

...the liberty of the Press is called the Palladium of Freedom, which means, in these days, the liberty of being deceived, swindled, and humbugged by the Press and paying hugely for the deception.

If you want to rip the heart out of a democracy, you go after the facts. That's what modern authoritarians do. You lie. All the time. Then, you say it's your opponents and the journalists who lie.

Journalism is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day-by-day, between-elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they go to the polls and cast their ballots for either one of the two candidates of their exploiters.

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

They're feeding the people a line of bull, and they are spinning and people are dying.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, which is just long enough to be president of the United States.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.

The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.

Younger people who are being indoctrinated into the contemporary system of falsification - they really have to do some research to find out what is the truth. In the general population, people forget or don't care that much. And gradually what you hear drilled into your head everyday comes to be believed. People don't understand what you're talking about any more if you discuss the American war on South Vietnam.

...History shows that ... (people) can be deflected from their natural tendencies by artful propaganda, bogus crises, or other political trickery.

But lies were what people wanted; that was politics.

Nazi propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels once remarked that if a lie is told often enough people will begin to see the lie as truth.

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

That's basically what's going on now: Everything is propaganda.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

The Iraq War was the biggest issue for people of my generation in the West. It was also the clearest case, in my living memory, of media manipulation and the creation of a war through ignorance.

Quite frankly, having an uninformed populace works extremely well, particularly when you have a media that doesn't understand its responsibility and feels more like it's an arm of a political party. They can really take advantage of an uninformed populace.

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.