Randal Marlin Quotes

The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people.

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

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

Televisions and radios are locked on government frequencies - it is a serious crime to listen to a foreign broadcast. As a result, North Koreans think that they live in the best country in the world and that, as difficult as their lives may be, everybody else has it much worse.

As I speak to you today, government censors somewhere are working furiously to erase my words from the records of history. But history itself has already condemned these tactics.

With the instrument of radio you can make public opinion. Perhaps even conquer a country.

The administration shaded the truth … I was part of the propaganda campaign.

The planned use of information targeted at specific audiences using any media available to achieve desired outcomes that primarily benefit the source

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.

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?

Today, the Chinese government blocks websites and search results with the so called Great Firewall, an army of censors deletes articles and comments deemed politically sensitive, and legions of government-sponsored Internet users steer online sentiment in the government’s favor by posting pro-Communist Party and nationalist comments in discussion forums.

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.

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

We're so saturated with propaganda every way you look that we don't notice it. But when it isn't there, you notice.

Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.

There is no need for propaganda to be rich in intellectual content.

There's a fine line between information and propaganda.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it.

When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.

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.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.

[This is the] very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda: a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with.

The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.

It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.