John Pilger Quotes

China's censorship and propaganda systems may be complex and multilayered, but they are obviously not well coordinated.

The press is the hired agent of a monied system, and set up for no other purpose than to tell lies where their interests are involved. One can trust nobody and nothing.

While they shriek for "freedom of the press" when there is no slightest threat to that freedom, they deny to citizens that freedom from the press to which the decencies of life entitle them. They misrepresent, they distort, they color, they blackguard, they lie.

I was instructed let’s put out press releases touting advances and let’s minimize problems because we want the Department of Home Security to be a good news story…. But you have to tell the truth when you are in a job like this.

The press aren't willing to wait for whatever the truth is - the truth never catches up with the lie... Destroying people ought not to be a competitive business.

If you can make people believe lies are the facts, then you can control them.

The government doesn't go about refuting everything that floats around.

Washington is the place where nobody believes a rumor until it has been officially denied.

Everything which might cause doubt about the wisdom of the government or create discontent will be kept from the people. The basis of unfavorable comparisons with elsewhere, the knowledge of possible alternatives to the course actually taken, information which might suggest failure on the part of the government to live up to its promises or to take advantage of opportunities to improve conditions--all will be suppressed. There is consequently no field where the systematic control of information will not be practiced and uniformity of views not enforced.

There is thus little or no ability for an internet user to know when they are being covertly propagandized by their government, which is precisely what makes it so appealing to intelligence agencies, so powerful, and so dangerous.

One of the tricks of the west is to use or create images, they create images of a person who doesn't go along with their views and then they make certain that this image is distasteful, and then anything that that person has to say from thereon, from thereon in, is rejected.

It's hard to believe that in the greatest democracy in the world, we need legislation to prevent the government from writing and paying for the news.

Government want to tell you things you can't say because they're against the law, or you can't say this because it's against a regulation, or here's something you can't say because its a... secret; "You can't tell him that because he's not cleared to know that." Government wants to control information and control language because that's the way you control thought, and basically that's the game they're in.

In the Soviet Union you weren't allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

The media is in charge of what you think. They're in charge of what you know and don't know. And any challenge to that, like alternative media or a president with direct access to the audience and doesn't need them, is a threat.

I don't believe you can contain ideas by military force.

In an age where there's so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. Where some overzealousness on the part of, you know, a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere.

Hitler and Joseph Goebbels understood that if you say something loud and long enough many people will believe it. A good journalist's first priority should be to separate propaganda from fact - but sometimes its very hard to do that.

The Federal Narcotics Bureau does a grave disservice by disseminating a lot of misinformation. Most of what they say is such nonsense that I didn't believe them about addiction.

I do believe that is a template that I stick very strongly to to tell the truth in an increasing swelter of lies and misinformation and disinformation.

By means of shrewd lies, unremittingly repeated, it is possible to make people believe that heaven is hell - and hell heaven. The greater the lie, the more readily it will be believed.

who are the brain police?

The Russian Bolsheviks have discovered that truth does not matter so long as there is reiteration. They have no difficulty whatever in countering a fact by a lie which, if repeated often enough and loudly enough, becomes accepted by the people.

Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.

One of the problems of truth being censored for a really long time is that people lose the ability to intuit what truth might be, and therefore begin to swallow whatever they're fed. I think that's something that the Chinese have learned very well. They've even managed to persuade quite large segments of the population that the martyrs of Tiananmen were actually an anti-national element. People don't view them as heroes, they see them as troublemakers. There you have a combination of censorship of truth creating a new truth, which is the lie, but it's not seen as such.