Bill Halter Quotes

The permanent campaign is inherently deceptive.

Advertising is the modern substitute for argument; its function is to make the worse appear the better.

The spin overwhelms the substance. That's very clearly what happened.

We are apt to be deluded into false security by political catchwords, devised to flatter rather than instruct.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

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

When people see political ads, they think someone's lying to them.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

He warns the heads of parties against believing their own lies

Lincoln was right about not fooling all the people all of the time. But the Republicans haven't given up trying.

The 1934 Republican response to the Upton Sinclair campaign for California Governor marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread East, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

That product of the human intelligence which we denominate the Campaign Lie, though it did not originate in the United States, has here attained a development unknown in other lands. It is the destiny of America to try all experiments and exhaust all follies. In the short space of seventy-seven years, we have exhausted the efficiency of falsehood uttered to keep a man out of office.

The world of messaging is the world of campaign consultants, of politicians, who are like trained seals who are given their message and then they perform. I’m not into that.

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

Officials in every White House crowbar the facts to make their cases.

We are in the middle of a big swamp of ignorance that is taught by a lot of nonsense, propaganda, absurdity, amalgams. I have a hard time listening to any speech. You feel like you want to stop the TV every two seconds to rephrase them, because it's lie after lie, turning stuff upside down, and you can't follow that. That's the trap.

One of the most overused phrases in political commentary is that someone is running a 'negative' campaign filled with 'attack' ads.

One of the most important skills for political success is the ability to make confident assertions of absurdities or lies.

It's often been observed that the first casualty of war is the truth. But that's a lie, too, in its way. The reality is that, for most wars to begin, the truth has to have been sacrificed a long time in advance.

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

Man's mind is so formed that it is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth.