Gary Larson Quotes

Propaganda tries first of all to create conditioned reflexes in the individual so that certain words, signs, or symbols, even certain persons or facts, provoke unfailing reactions...The important thing is that when the time is ripe, the individual can be thrown into action by the utilization of the psychological levers that have been set up.

Programmers and marketing people know how to get into your subconscious - they spend millions of dollars researching colors, shapes, designs, symbols, that affect your preferences, and they can make you feel warm, trusting, like buying. They can manipulate you.

The easiest way to propagandize people is to let a propaganda theme go in through an entertainment picture when people do not realize they are being propagandized.

We're able to use certain techniques to get people to behave in certain ways. We're able to use certain techniques to make it look like we're reading minds, even though we're not.

I can't control everybody's mind.

You can feel how much money goes into commercials by how swiftly they act on your mind. And they've got, like, a hypnotic quality to the way they present their products.

Good advertising can make people buy your product even if it sucks ... A dollar spent on brainwashing is more cost-effective than a dollar spent on product improvement.

Among some of the organized methods used to control the world is the thing known and called PROPAGANDA. Propaganda has done more to defeat the good intentions of races and nations than even open warfare. Propaganda is a method or medium used by organized peoples to convert others against their will. We of the Negro race are suffering more than any other race in the world from propaganda... propaganda to destroy our hopes, our ambitions and our confidence in self.

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.

A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance.

There is a sense that everything should be easy, but easy decisions are the ones we should be scared of because if they're easy then we're probably being sold something. This is why I'm worried about "nudge" - it's pushing people in the direction of what you think they should be doing. Easy decisions are dangerous ones.

These repetitive words and phrases are merely methods of convincing the subconscious mind.

It's a big culture of mind control too, MK-Ultra mind control rules in Hollywood. If you don't know that, google it and look into it. It's really hard for artists to find their voice in the media. It's levels of brainwashing and mind control.

This is the secret of propaganda: Those who are to be persuaded by it should be completely immersed in the ideas of the propaganda, without ever noticing that they are being immersed in it.

The art of persuasion. The actor persuades himself, first, and through himself, the audience.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

A principle familiar to propagandists is that the doctrine to be instilled in the target audience should not be articulated: that would only expose them to reflection, inquiry, and, very likely, ridicule. The proper procedure is to drill them home by constantly presupposing them, so that they become the very condition for discourse.

Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

The most dramatic instances of directed behavior change and "mind control" are not the consequence of exotic forms of influence, such as hypnosis, psychotropic drugs, or "brainwashing," but rather the systematic manipulation of the most mundane aspects of human nature over time in confining settings.

If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence. It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.

I'm so proud of myself. I worked with anger, with the darkest things in the world.

In my lifetime all our problems have come from mainland Europe and all the solutions have come from the English-speaking nations across the world.

Let's say you're someone's phone, and you notice that your owner is drinking coffee at certain times of the day, just very subtly indicating where the local coffee shop is which happens to have paid, you know, whoever makes your phone at the right moment. I think we're in a future where frankly we are possibly facing little tiny bits of manipulation in all of our waking hours, if we don't have that already.