Gore Vidal Quotes

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.

Of all newspaper presses, I never heard anyone deny that the American is the worst.... [N]othing is easier than to make the people know only one side of a question; few things are easier than to keep them altogether from the knowledge of any particular affair; and, worse than all, on them [the American people] may easily be practiced the discovery that lies may work their intended effect, before the truth can overtake them. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true or the suppression of things that are.

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

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

The closer one gets to elections or wars, the further one gets from the truth.

I have opened newspapers and read incredible lies.

I remain terrified of the capacity of the media, the capacity of spin doctors, here and abroad, particularly the United States media, to perpetuate false lies, perpetuate lies.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

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

Journalists say a thing that they know isn't true, in the hope that if they keep on saying it long enough it will be true.

How is the world ruled and led to war? Diplomats lie to journalists and believe these lies when they see them in print.

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.

The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people. have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.

In this crazy political business, at least in our times, a lie unanswered becomes truth within 24 hours.

Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read.

Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.

Trump followed Fox's lead. He parroted what he heard on TV. He lied and lied, but rather than suffer the consequences, his lies were excused and supported and even celebrated by his media enablers.

The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!

One of the hopeful things that I've discovered is that nearly every war that has started in the past 50 years has been a result of media lies. The media could've stopped it if they had searched deep enough; if they hadn't reprinted government propaganda they could've stopped it.

The public is easily amenable to lies: the more lies there are, the greater the support for war. For instance, when the public was told that Saddam Hussein would attack the U.S., this increased support for the war.

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

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.

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?

Every day we are slathered with the biggest bunk of lies and distortions and half-truths that I can recall. And all the while the American left is doing its best to bring down this country as founded.

The problem is that Iran has been identified as a dangerous enemy, and the longer the media forwards that proposition - and the media is guilty, just as it was in the Iraq war - then the easier it becomes for Americans to accept that we might just have to resort to military force to remove any Iranian threat.