Mass Distraction Quotes

Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses.

Our—Islam’s—problems didn’t start with the dastardly Crusaders. Our problems started with us. To this day, Muslims use the white man as a weapon of mass distraction—a distraction from the fact that we have never needed the “oppressive” West to oppress our own.

You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption.

In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses

There are millions of Americans who belong by nature in movie theaters as they belong at political rallies or in fortuneteller parlors and on the shoot-the-chutes. To these millions, the movies are a sort of boon - a gaudier version of religion.

Nobody has ever gone broke selling escape to the American public.

[People] somehow assume that the Internet is going to be the catalyst of change that will push young people into the streets, while in fact it may actually be the new opium for the masses which will keep the same people in their rooms downloading pornography.

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.

The mass production of distraction is now as much a part of the American way of life as the mass production of automobiles.

Religion is the yeast of death cakes. It is the most awful agent on a vulnerable mind. It's the refuge of alienated and lonely people. It's what people had before television. It yokes people together into an imaginary world. It is just people talking to their imaginary friends, at length. I wouldn't mind, but some of the people are world leaders.

So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

When I came to England I was quite surprised to see that you people have it too. But why people are so interested in other people's private lives is beyond me. It's like group hypnosis, or something - a giant distraction.

If the masses are not thrown a few novels , they may react by throwing up a few barricades.

The insanity of consumption bothers me. Talk about the opiate of the masses. It ain't religion anymore. It's stuff.

War may be the game of kings, but, like the games at ancient Rome, it is generally exhibited to please and pacify the people.

In fact I think now we've reached a point now, where the powers that be really have sort of vested interest in all of us being stoned out as much as possible all the time so we don't know what's going on, and we don't care.

The majority of Americans, the ones who never elected George W. Bush, are not fooled by his weapons of mass distraction.

Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.

Professional sports, in of itself, is a fantasy, for the majority of the population.