Max Lerner Quotes

In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.

Since I was 9, I'd been told what to say, what to think.

A functioning police state needs no police.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

I don't think it takes much for a cult to be a cult. Many parts of our society are cultish, and you only need a charismatic leader and some teachings, and before you know it, you have a cult.

We must form men so that they can only will what we wish them to will.

Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

It wasn't fun to go to school, because we had to wear these blue things around our necks. We had to join the Pioneer Society, and we had to salute with our hands over our eyes. Even then, I was thinking for myself. I thought this wasn't so different from the way the Nazis had conditioned people.

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Dictators have an old trick to assess the strength of their opposition: they say something patently untrue, and then look to see who mindlessly repeats it. Those who do, they recognise as their true supporters.

It turns out we are all quite easily swayed if someone knows what they are doing - which is a great thing and a dangerous thing.

From now on, we're home schooling you. Whatever we don't know, you don't know. When did the Korean War start? I don't know, and neither do you!

The American people are free to do exactly what they are told.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.

Conventional opinions fit so comfortably into the dominant paradigm as to be seen not as opinions but as statements of fact, as 'the nature of things.' The very efficacy of opinion manipulation rests on the fact that we do not know we are being manipulated. The most insidious forms of oppression are those that so insinuate themselves into our communication universe and the recesses of our minds that we do not even realize they are acting upon us.

Military discipline is merely a perfection of social servitude.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

My relationship to power and authority is that I'm all for it.

truth ... is the first casualty of tyranny.

The desire to order other people around and make them conform to one own's vision takes many forms.

What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word "We.

Screw the truth into men's minds.

We know that the great majority of people have a strong need for authority which it can admire, to which it can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it.

a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.