Antony Beevor Quotes

The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

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.

Everywhere you look, there's someone doing your thinking for you and telling you what to think and when to think of it.

Fear is hugely contagious. Used skillfully by politicians looking to manipulate voters, it can become toxic and capable of infecting more than just a few.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening

Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of brainwashing under freedom to which we are subjected and which all too often we are as willing or unwitting instruments

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.

You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

All it takes is one generation to brainwash a population and convince them that reality doesn't exist

If you wish to persuade people that because Adam ate an apple, all who have never heard of this interesting occurrence will be roasted in an everlasting fire by a benevolent Deity, you must catch them young, make them stupid by means of drink or drugs, and carefully isolate them from all contact with books or companions capable of making them think.

Crowds can be frightening. They have a way of impressing the low, base taste upon their members. Watching the way thousands of people in his audience could not think for themselves, could not find the courage to allow their ordinary feelings of decency and taste to prevail, I understood better how demagogues are possible.

It is an old, old adage that if you want someone to do something, get them to believe it is their idea. Humanity is mind controlled and onlyslightly more conscious than your average zombie. Far fetched? No, no. I define mind control as the manipulation of someone's mind so that they think, and therefor act, the way you want them to.

The thing is, when everyone is trying to persuade you that a thing you know to be true isn't actually true, you start to believe them: not because it is true but because it's easier. It's just the easy way out.

A mind virus is different in that there is no form to it; these are ideas placed in our heads when we are little. We get programmed by well-meaning people like our parents and their parents, our culture, religions and schools. We get conditioned to believe in our limitations and what's not possible.

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.

Stop being frightened. You only see a monster because they want you to see monsters everywhere. They've conditioned you to look for monsters in every shadow, every coat hung on every door. As long as we keep seeing monsters, we'll continue to need protection and that's how other people get to control our lives.

I was an emotional manipulator of fighters . . . You have to know how to be cold, you know? Just have no -emotions, no feelings. It takes time, though, to develop that. I'd been working on that since I was 12 years old. It doesn't happen overnight.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

If you've lived in a dictatorship for thirty years, you're used to people lying to you.

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The greater the lie, the greater chance that it will be believed. All epoch-making events have been produced not by the written, but the spoken word.

Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.

Your politicians, priests, parents, they all are guilt-creators, because that is the only way that you can be controlled and manipulated. A very simple, but very cunning trick to manipulate you. They have condemned you, because if you are accepted, not condemned - loved, appreciated, and if it is relayed to you from everywhere that you are okay - then it will be difficult to control you. How to control a person who is absolutely okay? The very problem doesn't arise.

The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born.