Noam Chomsky Quotes

Madison Avenue is a very powerful aggression against private consciousness. A demand that you yield your private consciousness to public manipulation.

Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.

Ever since Gutenberg, every dynasty, every political leader, every major religion, has recognized that to control the media is to have a powerful instrument for controlling the values and behavior of a population.

It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale.

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

The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.

The bosses of our mass media, press, radio, film and television, succeed in their aim of taking our minds off disaster. Thus, the distraction they offer demands the antidote of maximum concentration on disaster.

With the supermarket as our temple and the singing commercial as our litany, are we likely to fire the world with an irresistible vision of America's exalted purpose and inspiring way of life?

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

This thing that Colin Powell's son is expected to do is kind of scary when you think that television and radio and newspapers are what make people think what they think.

Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.

What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn't deny it and doesn't try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

Slogans are both exciting and comforting, but they are also powerful opiates for the conscience.

Whoever controls the media—the images—controls the culture.

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized opinions and habits of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment.

We have a free society, and the totalitarian states are dungeons. We have totally different methods of population control…. We can’t control people so we have to control what they think.

I hate television, but that's me. It's like sucking your thumb. It's a wonderful thing for keeping the masses enslaved.

There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

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

It [culture] invites people to diminish themselves, and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines, meme processors of memes passed down from Madison Avenue, and Hollywood, and what have you.

The means of communication, the irresistible output of the entertainment and information industry carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers to the producers and, through the latter to the whole social system. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood...Thus emerges a pattern of one-dimensional thought and behavior.