James P. Hogan Quotes

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.

We live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. 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.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

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.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

All our advertising is propaganda, of course, but it has become so much a part of our life, is so pervasive, that we just don't know what it is propaganda for.

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

In order to govern you have to feed the news cycle

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

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

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

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.

Facts are a thing of the past. Americans may find it impossible to debate politics clearly because of a lack of agreement on basic matters of fact: that was certainly the case in this yea'rs Presidential election [2016]. And no one has taken more advantage of this than Donal;d Trump ... Trump and his talking heads didn't create this world. It is the result of decadews-long stategy devised devised by a numbe of public affairs practitioners who recognized that lies were the most potent weapoin in the fight against progress,

I know propaganda when I see it, and I can speak with authority on it.

The ones who are the smartest are the ones who use us. In other words, they understand the relationship between the press and leaders.

Trump, in the crinkling of an eye, senses better than anyone the insecurity of people, that nobody knows whether anything is good or bad until they are told, and he is quite willing to tell them immediately.

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.

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

We live in a world where we don't really hear ideas. We just hear propaganda. That's not just boring. It's also very dangerous.

Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.

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.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.