Keith Olbermann Quotes

The idea that fear can manipulate people and you can use fear in the media to get what you want is happening right now. I think it has a lot of relevance between 2017 and 70's.

Authoritarian political ideologies have a vested interest in promoting fear, a sense of the imminence of takeover by aliens and real diseases are useful material.

What we wanted to do was have a terror campaign to terrify Arbenz particularly to terrify his troops, much as the German Stuka bombers terrified the population of Holland at the onset of World War II.

Jingoism, racism, fear, religious fundamentalism: these are the ways of appealing to people if you're trying to organize a mass base of support for policies that are really intended to crush them.

We are manipulated by fear and the fear of others, and how we're often manipulated into doing things and voting in ways that are against our own best interest. Look at healthcare. People will tell you that healthcare is socialism and communism, and they're doing this while their wife needs an operation and their kid needs braces.

Well, you know, they use those words so that they can scare people "terror" and "cell."

Then I know Prim is right, that Snow cannot afford to waste Peeta's life, especially now, while the Mockingjay causes so much havoc. He's killed Cinna already. Destroyed my home. My family, Gale, and even Haymitch are out of his reach. Peeta's all he has left. "So, what do you think they'll do to him?" I ask. Prim sound about a thousand years old when she speaks."Whatever it takes to break you.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Hearts and Minds

We shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so that they will vote for you or scaring people to date so that we can create a terror-industrial complex.

Terrorism is a strategy of provocation.

The Republicans galvanize their base by inciting a lot of fear; they operate on a lot of mythmaking. So we have to have something compelling. We shouldn't be afraid to be bold.

That's how we invaded Iraq, through the fear of an 'evil empire,' and it just makes people feel like bulls with the toreadors - you see red, and you charge.

I'm not for one second condoning the actions of terrorists at all, but I do think there's a kind of terrorism that the media carries out on its own citizens, certainly in this country - and it's fear.

Putting fear into people is the principal goal of terrorists, and they have been successful.

Al-Qaida became the new Soviet Union, and in the process, Bin Laden became a demonic, terrifyingly powerful figure brooding in a cave while he controlled and directed the al-Qaida network throughout the world. In this way, a serious but manageable terrorist threat became grossly exaggerated.

It hasn't taken them long, they began by telling us they would have a positive and patriotic case and they're back to project fear within minutes. There they go again they have nothing positive to say.

The goal of terror is not traditional territorial enlargement; rather the war target of the terrorist is the dismemberment of the will of the community it terrorizes.

I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten indeed the word 'terrorized' is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be.

My fear is that the Tea Party gets a charismatic leader. Because all they're selling is fear and anger. And that's all Hitler sold. 'I'm angry and I'm frightened, and you should hate that guy over there.' And that's what they're doing.

Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience - war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.

The people who have the power want you scared. They want you walking around paralyzed by the notion that you could die at any moment.

Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.

Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality.

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The greater the lie, the greater chance that it will be believed. All epoch-making events have been produced not by the written, but the spoken word.