Noam Chomsky Quotes

It is well known that in war, the first casualty is truth - that during any war truth is forsaken for propaganda.

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

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

They are longing for a war with Iran. Iran is no more a harm to us than was Iraq or Afghanistan. They invented an enemy, they tell lies, lies, lies. The New York Times goes along with their lies, lies, lies. And they don't stop. When the public that's lied to 30 times a day it's apt to believe the lies, is not it?

Unscrupulous agitators have been at work spreading atrocity stories which can only be compared with those lies that were fabricated by the same instigators at the beginning of the Great War.

Winston Churchill said 'In war time, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies'. Any book called The Truth should therefore have one.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, if not earlier, presidents have misled the public about their motives and their intentions in going to war.

You can see examples of this, such as where [George W.] Bush lied to the public, and as a result 72 percent of America was in favor of the Iraqi invasion. Yet now the truth has presented itself and they are trying to save face by appealing to the public's national-istic persona, talking about winning and honor and everything as a reason to continue that illegal immoral occupation.

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre.

I remember the Korean War very well. And I remember the soldiers who were POWs who supposedly were "brainwashed," quote, unquote, who gave in, so to speak. And when they came back, they were treated like pariahs and traitors.

In the first World War British propaganda had to invent the stories of German soldiers bayoneting Belgian babies, because there were too few real atrocities to feed the hatred against the enemy.

The capitalist can only make a whole people go to war . . . by capturing the popular will. The only prophylactic against that situation is to make the public aware of the way in which it is being misled.

Two increasing themes which appear to dominate our listening, reading and watching lives are propaganda and 'national security', or manufactured war.

The media, itself an arm of mega-corporate power, feeds the fear industry, so that people are primed like pumps to support wars on rumor, innuendo, legends, and lies.

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,You take the human being and you twist it all aboutSo scrub my skin with womenChain my tongue with whiskyStuff my nose with garlicCoat my eyes with butterFill my ears with silverStick my legs in plasterTell me lies about Vietnam.

For the strategies of deception are concerned with deceiving an opponent through the logistics of perception. But these strategies are not merely aimed at the Serbs or the Iraqis but also at all those who might support [Slobodan] Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.

Thomas Jefferson once said: 'Of course the people don't want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.' I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot." [Hosting the Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, June 6, 2006]

British politicians used to be good at misleading people without actually lying.

What if the American people woke up and understood that the official reasons for going to war are almost always based on lies and promoted by war propaganda in order to serve special interests?

That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.

Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.

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

A definite factor in getting a lie believed is the size of the lie. The broad mass of the people, in the simplicity of their hearts, more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.

The Russian Bolsheviks have discovered that truth does not matter so long as there is reiteration. They have no difficulty whatever in countering a fact by a lie which, if repeated often enough and loudly enough, becomes accepted by the people.

Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war.