Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

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

Democracy allows rhetoric, false empathy and emotion to pummel rational thinking - so it's no wonder so many politicians thrive in it.

Those indoctrinated by leftist thinking become largely incapable of making accurate moral judgments.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.

Even intelligent people succumb to their own propaganda.

A democracy doesn’t use force to control its citizens; it uses propaganda instead.

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

There's so many lies being told throughout the media and people just run with the lies. They're numb to it. Too many followers, not enough leaders.

The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.

Failures of perspective in decision-making can be due to aspects of the social utility paradox, but more often result from simple mistakes caused by inadequate thought.

I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.

When everyone thinks alike, no one is thinking clearly.

'Stupidity' defines the mental state wherein we acknowledge that we've never been smarter as individuals and yet somehow we've never felt stupider. We now collectively inhabit a state of stupidity.

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

There's always something suspect about an intellectual on the winning side.

The ability to convince people of the wackiest notions - and both parties can do it - it's part of the dumbing down of America that's really highly problematic.

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

Society and the system and politicians don't want people to be aware of things. They want people to believe what they have to show 'em.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.

The public are not stupid.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

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