Public Manipulation Quotes

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

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

That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.

I've been fooling the public for years and I'm really good at it.

Governments are supposed to lie to their citizens.

You never ask the public individual to decide. You can teach them anything, particularly the truth. But never ask them to decide.

The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.

The Statist has an insatiable appetite for control. His sights are set on his next meal even before he has fully digested his last. He is constantly agitating for government action. And in furtherance of that purpose, the Statist speaks in the tongue of the demagogue, concocting one pretext and grievance after another to manipulate public perceptions and build popular momentum for the divestiture of liberty and property from its rightful possessors.

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

I can stand by no longer and see these disgusting performances by the Navy and War Departments at the expense of the lives of our people, and the delusion of the American public.

But, after all, it is the leaders of the 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.

For the strategies of deception are concerned with deceiving an opponent through the logistics of perception. But these strategies are not merely aimed at the Serbs or the Iraqis but also at all those who might support [Slobodan] Milosevic or Saddam Hussein.

When a top political leader (or a military dictator) faces a substantial public opinion that openly expresses its lack of faith/trust in his leadership qualities, the leader/dictator in turn tries to find (real or imagined) enemies ‘out there’ to divert public attention.

In 2017, there was a sudden recognition of several adverse societal consequences of information technology, from job losses due to automation to manipulation of public opinion, with significant political consequences.

Peace, Inc. is sometimes as worrying as War, Inc. It's a way of managing public anger. We're all being managed, and we don't even know it.

More frightening to me than any policy or politician is the ease with which the public is played for fools with words. The latest example is the 'Employee Freedom of Choice Act,' a bill that will do away with secret ballot elections among workers voting on whether to be represented by a union. It is an open invitation to intimidation - which is to say, loss of freedom of choice.

In two weeks the sheeplike masses of any country can be worked up by the newspapers into such a state of excited fury that men are prepared to put on uniforms and kill and be killed, for the sake of the sordid ends of a few interested parties. Compulsory military service seems to me the most disgraceful symptom of that deficiency in personal dignity from which civilized mankind is suffering today.

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim, denounces it, and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.

Unaccountable private power concentrations that dominate economic and social life have the means to seek to "regiment the public mind," and become "tools and tyrants" of government, in James Madison's memorable phrase, as he warned of the threats he discerned to the democratic experiment if private powers were granted free rein.

Far from being reluctantly propelled into hostilities by popular war fever, leaders incite that fever in order to gather support for their war policies. Thereby do they attempt to distract the public from pressing domestic matters, serve the overseas interests of U.S. investors, justify gargantuan military budgets, and present themselves as great leaders.

The vested interests-if we explain the situation by their influence-can only get the public to act as they wish by manipulating public opinion, by playing either upon the public's indifference, confusions, prejudices, pugnacities or fears. And the only way in which the power of the interests can be undermined and their maneuvers defeated is by bringing home to the public the danger of its indifference, the absurdity of its prejudices, or the hollowness of its fears; by showing that it is indifferent to danger where real danger exists; frightened by dangers which are nonexistent.

Jews have always controlled the business... The motion picture influence of the United States and Canada...is exclusively under the control, moral and financial, of the Jewish manipulators of the public mind.

With each newly minted crisis, US leaders roll out the same time-tested scenario. They start demonizing a foreign leader ... charging them with being communistic or otherwise dictatorial, dangerously aggressive, power hungry, genocidal, given to terrorism or drug trafficking, ready to deny us access to vital resources, harboring weapons of mass destruction, or just inexplicably "anti-American" and "anti-West." Lacking any information to the contrary, the frightened public ... are swept along.

The Smithsonian’s own view of its mission was that it should “tell visitors immediately what we are about and how we’d like them to change.” In other words, the purpose of a taxpayer-supported institution is to express the ideologies of those who run it and to brainwash the visiting public with the vision of the anointed.