Kayvan Novak Quotes

The press is like a woman: sublime when it lies, it will not let go until it has forced you to believe it. The public, like a foolish husband, always succumbs.

The Three Branches of Government: Money, Television, and Bullshit

You can't fool television viewers with dancing girls and flashing lights.

In the days of Caesar, kings had fools and jesters. Now network presidents have anchormen.

I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

It is precisely the purpose of the public opinion generated by the press to make the public incapable of judging, to insinuate into it the attitude of someone irresponsible, uninformed.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III - that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it - they have all the fun!

Because I live and work in Washington, D.C., I have a ringside seat at the world capital of The Persuasive Arts, or, as I like to call it, The Opinions Racket.

The press is like a big bass, you just stick a hook in their mouth and they'll take it.

The expressions of newspapers, like those of orators, could not be accepted without allowance, for they aimed at producing some desired effect, and said either more or less than the truth.

The nation whose population depends on the explosively compressed headline service of television news can expect to be exploited by the demagogues and dictators who prey upon the semi-informed.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.

The Press has not only a great influence over our manners and morals, but contributes largely to our pleasures.

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Comedy is very disarming. It's a way to talk about things and still be light-hearted. And when it's done really well, you never see the strings, whereas when you watch an infomercial or a politician speaking, a lot of times you can see the strings, you can see what agenda they're trying to push.

Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar's Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called? Fox News, I think.

If Democrats don't go on Fox News, it doesn't mean that people stop watching.

The democratic system is challenged by the failure in television because our evening news programmes have gone for an attempt to entertain as much as to inform in the desperate fight for ratings.

I do like 'The Truman Show.'

There is a feedback loop between Trump and TV that is both good and bad.

I want to steer the national conversation in the right direction, from my point of view. I want to get under Robert Gibbs' skin and Rahm Emanuel's skin and Barack Obama's skin.

I knew how to upset the people, and I did it in such a way that it was believable. That's how I made a living at it for 20 years. I don't regret a thing I done or said in wrestling. Nothing.

We buy into all kinds of lies that are sold to us from advertising to Fox news or from the Vatican to Goldman Sachs.