Michael Korda Quotes

Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.

When a wrong thought is told a thousand times and impressed on one’s brain, one starts feeling the falsehood as truth. Similarly if the mind of slave is hammered of slavery, he starts enjoying his slavery

I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great, and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

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.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

The way brainwashing works is subtle and takes a long time.

A friend of mine had this great theory about the Teletubbies, that it's preparing us for being mindless. And getting us ready for living in an underground world. That's why the scenery is so flat.

In a cult intervention information is presented about the group that the member is most often not aware of.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.

The assembly has witnessed how historical truth is established. Once an allegation is repeated a few times, it is no longer an allegation. It is an established fact, even if no evidence has been brought out in order to support it.

Facts just don’t mean anything anymore. It’s who shouts the loudest and repeats it the most.

I see the 'z' in 'Humanz' as referring to robots, AI, programming, brainwashing, indoctrination. And it's a question to us: are we human, or are we humanz? Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves? Do we just believe what we're told? That's how I see it.

We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak.

The public is gullible. ... If [many satirists are] making the same joke, that's the danger. Then there's a solidifying effect and it becomes a truth.

If you repeat something long enough people believe it's what happened.

The indoctrination is so deep that educated people think they’re being objective.

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

Fake news and rumors thrive online because few verify what's real and always bias towards content that reinforces their own biases.

Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.

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.

I'm a simple country neuroscientist, not an expert on democracy, but I do know something about how the brain works and how opinion-reinforcing bubbles can distort the picture of reality we build from the information we encounter on a daily basis.

The biggest problem is that Facebook and Google are these giant feedback loops that give people what they want to hear. And when you use them in a world where your biases are being constantly confirmed, you become susceptible to fake news, propaganda, demagoguery.