Kirstjen Nielsen Quotes

If we're not vigilant foreign countries can have an impact on the political debate in the United States in ways that might not have been true 10, 20, 30 years ago in - in part because of the way news is transmitted and in part because so many people are skeptical of mainstream news organizations that - everything's true and everything's false.

That's basically what's going on now: Everything is propaganda.

To fill the minds of the public with hatreds, jealousies, and suspicions is to poison the fountains of public security.

We find—in the case of political affairs—that the most servile submission to privileged classes, and the grossest abuses of power by these, have been the precursors of the wildest ebullitions of popular fury,—of the overthrow indiscriminately of ancient institutions, good and bad.

Is the government well served when a Secretary of State misleads public opinion, confuses it, feeds it pap, tells it that ... Soviet triumphs are really defeats, and Western defeats are really triumphs?

A perfectly thriving state can, in a matter of months and even days, be transformed into an arena of fierce armed conflct by political, economic, informational, humanitarian, and other nonmilitary measures applied in coordination with the protest potential of the population.

The fossil fuel industry has taken control of, and powered up, architecture and methods originally built by the tobacco industry and others to attack and deny science.

No single solution or actor can deal with the complex and interrelated challenges to electoral integrity arising from manipulated data, hate speech, and fake news. These phenomena are not new; they have been part of electoral cycles since the advent of democracy.

The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

The Russian propaganda machine, even in the U.S., is not to be discounted.

I do believe that Russia did and will continue to try and manipulate Americans' perspective on a whole variety of issues.

There's a fine line between information and propaganda.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

Most of the population in America is disenfranchised. It doesn't matter what they think. Just look at the passionate rhetoric about how we can't stand by when a country uses weapons to kill innocent civilians.

It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.

The wavering multitude is divided into opposite factions.

Donald Trump is, in effect, the Recruiter-in-Chief for ISIS. ISIS wants nothing more right now than to have the world divided into Judeo-Christian on one side and the Islamic world on the other. That's exactly what Trump is doing for them. I think it's time we start with thinking about what ISIS wants and then not doing it.

Chinese central government doesn't need to even lead public opinion: it just selectively stops censorship. In other words, just as censorship is a political tool, so is the absence of censorship.

With increasing frequency and growing vehemence, you hear people saying they are ashamed to be Australians.

At no time in the past, now or in the future has or will Russia take any part in actions aimed at overthrowing the legitimate government. I'm talking about something else right now - when someone does this, the outcome is very negative. Libya's state is disintegrated, Iraq's territory is flooded with terrorists, it looks like the scenario will be the same for Syria, and you know what the situation is in Afghanistan.

I don't believe there are climate skeptics. I think there are people who indulge in a culture of what can be reduced to Fox network thinking. That has nothing to do with the politics that apply to the protection of quality of life in any sense. It's like talking to a member of a cult.

The Iraq War is the first war in history, in which there were huge demonstrations before the war was launched, not beginning five years later and then being broken up. All of these are changes, and the people who are writing in journals today lived through these changes.

The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince... the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.

The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.