Philip K. Dick Quotes

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups...So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

Official truths are often powerful illusions.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

We Liberals like to think our thoughts aren't controlled. We pride ourselves on our independent thinking. We know we shouldn't believe everything we read. We realize the media is skewed, we know it's owned by a small group of people, we realize it's biased, etc.

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

The world is a complex place, and the influence of the media in its representation and its power of communication and interpretation is a remarkable amplifier of emotions, and of illusions.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

I think the media spends a lot of time fooling itself.

The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

The media has affected everybody's consciousness much more than most people will admit.

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

With the instrument of radio you can make public opinion. Perhaps even conquer a country.

The delusion of the people is necessary to the dominant party. I see the extent to which that delusion has been already carried, and I see there is no length to which it may not be pushed by a party in possession of the revenues and the legal authorities of the United States

Give me the writing of a nation's advertising and propaganda, and I care not who governs its politics.

Propaganda as a mere tool is no more moral or immoral than a pump handle....the only effective weapon against propaganda on behalf of one policy seems to be propaganda on behalf of an alternative.

Propaganda today relies for the most part on repetition of catchwords that leaders wish listeners to accept on their face value without critical scrutiny, suppression of information that debates those catchwords, and rationalization of their cause to foment passions in the interest of the state or party.

Critics intend on changing the balance of public opinion and of political power.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

We are in a battle, and more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media

If those in charge of our society – politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television – can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.

We live in an age where people can not only choose their own sources, but they can choose their own facts.