Fearmongering Quotes

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth. We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn, and the like, toward those who disagree with us.

Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

In order to rally people, governments need enemies. They want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. And if they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Of course the people don't want war... It is the leaders...who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along...all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

We shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so that they will vote for you or scaring people to date so that we can create a terror-industrial complex.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

Are those making these charges better equipped to deal with the Ebola threat than those they castigate? These easy charges, nurtured in hindsight, by people by people who have never had to make decisions or have responsibilities in the matter, play into the national penchant for finger-pointing and feed panic.

McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.

To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world, is just as base as to use force.

The tyrant is always stirring up some war or another, in order that the people may require a leader.

The game of politics is to make you afraid so that you don’t think.

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.

It turns out that the Republican Party is not a hero to anyone but the racist, xenophobic caricature of a candidate that is Donald Trump.

It's the oldest trick in Washington - when presented with a policy solution you don't like, characterize it as the bogeyman.

There was a patriotic fervor and the Administration used it so that if you challenged anything you were made to feel that there was something wrong with that.... And there was even almost a patriotism police which, you know, they'd be up there on the internet sort of picking anything a Christiane Amanpour, or somebody else would say as if it were disloyal... Especially right after 9/11. Especially when the war in Afghanistan is going on.

This is a political season where politicians will do almost anything to prey on the public’s fear of job loses.

The government assures the people that they are in danger from the invasion of another nation, or from foes in their midst, and that the only way to escape this danger is by the slavish obedience of the people to their government. This fact is seen most prominently during revolutions and dictatorships, but it exists always and everywhere that the power of the government exists.

In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.

Every dictator uses religion as a prop to keep himself in power.

Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie - it's to make people fear the liar.

Since 9/11, every time there is an incident overseas attributed to Muslims or Arabs, we go on orange alert ourselves …. There are individuals here who are off the wall, who think that every woman who wears a hijab or every man named Muhammad is out to blow things up.