Edward Snowden Quotes

When it comes to scaring the bourgeoisie into showing up at the polls, nothing works better than negative advertising.

People spend money on negative campaigning because it works.

When George Bush used the Willie Horton ad, he knew what he was doing.

I suppose politicians have always wanted to get re-elected, but there's a kind of a feeling now that if you just discredit your opposition, it makes it easier for you to win. I don't think that's necessarily true.

It's important to ask candidates about their beliefs, in part because politicians frequently exploit religious faith - often with the idea that voters will be more likely to unthinkingly accept certain political positions so long as they arise from religious belief.

Politicians, no matter who they are, shouldn't be able to manipulate the public on a single issue and then call an election at the height of support - that's a little bit of a manipulation of democracy.

The Sangh Parivar, against which I had been waging a war, misled the people. My opponents used the Election Commission and the bureaucracy to win a political battle.

Despite all the public hand-wringing about negative advertising, political veterans will tell you that it persists because, more often than not, it works. But tearing down the other guy has another attraction: It can be a substitute for building much of a case for what the mudslinger will do once in office.

Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, was a bad guy.

WARNING: POLITICAL ADVERTISING CAN LEGALLY DISTORT THE TRUTH.

Negative politics in a primary campaign produces damaged goods but you've got to do what you've got to do.

The political innovation that produced the strongest impact was the manipulation of moving pictures. Alarmed by the Sinclair threat, MGM's Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg produced fake newsreels, using Hollywood actors. W.R. Hearst helped distribute them. For the first time, the screen was used to demolish a candidate, a precursor of political attack ads on television.

It wouldn’t hurt to remind the voters of what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear them at every opportunity….

You can't show up at a church every 4 October and say, 'Vote for me,' and call that persuasion.

I've got these high negatives because the Koch brothers have spent a year attacking me.

I think that Congress and its affiliates and journalists who support them have made trolling quite a sophisticated measure of intervention.

Trump's divisive rhetoric targets low-information voters and won't play well with the general public, either.

Tamil people are generally considered very intelligent. But there, politics runs in a different way. Movie stars have a larger-than-life image in Tamil Nadu, and people vote for that image.

The votes elected officials make should be based on the best interests of the American people, not the fear of retribution when shadowy groups spend millions of dollars on negative advertisements.

We are manipulated by fear and the fear of others, and how we're often manipulated into doing things and voting in ways that are against our own best interest. Look at healthcare. People will tell you that healthcare is socialism and communism, and they're doing this while their wife needs an operation and their kid needs braces.

I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.

If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.

The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.

Dependency is the highest political good - at least for politicians. Since the 1930s, politicians have striven to leave no vote unbought.

I don't know one person who has changed their vote from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump because Vladimir Putin wanted them to do that.