All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda. Upton Sinclair
Britain wanted America to join the war on its side. It established a secret operation to manipulate American news coverage of the war. Declassified: Secrets of World War I, A&E 2006
As soon as our own propaganda admits so much as a glimmer of right on the other side, the foundation for doubt in our own right has been laid. Adolf Hitler
This is the secret of propaganda: the saturation of a group of people with propagandist ideas without their noticing it. Of course it has a goal, but the goal must be so clever and so brilliantly concealed that the people who it influences don’t notice anything. Joseph Goebbels
Namely, one has to govern well then good propaganda will follow. One goes with the other. Good government without propaganda can scarcely stand any better that good propaganda without a good regime. Joseph Goebbels
It may be a good thing to hold power based on guns. It is far better if you win the hearts of the nation and keep its affection. Joseph Goebbels
To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall. Joseph Goebbels, speech January 1928
Goebbels was the strongest representative of anti-Semitism. He saw his big chance to become powerful by using the press for anti-Semitic reasons. Personally, I think Goebbels was using anti-Semitism merely as a means of achieving personal power. Whether he had any deep-seated hatred against the Jews is questionable. I think he was too much of a thief and dishonest opportunist to have any deep-seated feelings for or against anything. But for years Goebbels had been trying in vain to become a big power. At last he saw his chance. He had whipped up anti-Semitic feelings to such a point by his vicious propaganda that he now thought he could do anything. He probably didn’t think about the consequences himself. He was a fanatic of an abnormal calibre. Streicher was a tame man compared to Goebbels, because Streicher is half crazy and stupid, whereas Goebbels was just unscrupulous, clever and dangerous. You couldn’t discuss anything with Goebbels. And for the same reason, you couldn’t discuss anything with Himmler. Goebbels was so dishonest that it didn’t pay to discuss anything with him. Hermann Goering, interview Leon Goldensohn May 1946
There remains the problem of Goebbels’ reputation. He wore the title of Big Liar (bestowed by Anglo-Saxon propaganda) and yet he never stopped battling for propaganda to be as accurate as possible. He preferred being cynical and brutal to being caught in a lie. He used to say: ‘Everybody must know what the situation is.’ He was always the first to announce disastrous events or difficult situations, without hiding anything. The result was a general belief between 1939 and 1942 that German communiqués not only were more concise, clearer and less cluttered, but were more truthful than Allied communiqués (American and neutral opinion) – and, furthermore, that the Germans published all the news two or three days before the Allies. All this is so true that pinning the title of Big Liar on Goebbels must be considered quite a propaganda success. Jacques Ellul, The Characteristics of Propaganda
Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the US will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal ‘executive branch’ of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens. Chalmers Johnson
A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers ... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World foreword 1946 edition
The principles underlying propaganda are extremely simple. Find some common desire, some widespread unconscious fear or anxiety; think out some way to relate this wish or fear to the product you have to sell; then build a bridge of verbal or pictorial symbols over which your customer can pass from fact to compensatory dream, and from the dream to the illusion that your product, when purchased, will make the dream come true. They are selling hope.
We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not just buy an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the customer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda. Hannah Arendt
Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite. John Berger
Remember there has been a hundred and fifty years of very intense propaganda and indoctrination to try to drive these ideas out of people’s heads. Noam Chomsky, interview The Money Fix
The point of public relations slogans like Support our Troops is that they don’t mean anything ... 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. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That’s the one you’re not allowed to talk about. Noam Chomsky
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state. Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you’ve got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus. Noam Chomsky
The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly. Noam Chomsky
It’s basically an institutional analysis of the major media – what we call a Propaganda Model. We’re talking primarily about the national media, those media that set a general agenda that others adhere to ... The elite media are the agenda-setting media ... And they do this in all sorts of ways: by selection of topics, by distribution of concerns, by emphasis, by framing of issues, by filtering of information, by bounding of debate within certain limits, they determine, they select, they shape, they control, they restrict in order to serve the interests of dominant elite groups in society. Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent
The US media are alone in that you must meet the condition of concision. You’ve got to say things between two commercials. Or in six hundred words. And that’s a very important fact. Because the beauty of concision – saying a couple of sentences between two commercials – the beauty of that is that you only repeat conventional thoughts. ibid.
The influential political scientist Harold Lasswell explained in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences that when elites lack the requisite force to compel obedience, social managers must turn to ‘a whole new technique of control, largely through propaganda’. He added the conventional justification: we must recognize the ‘ignorance and stupidity [of] ... the masses’ and not succumb to ‘democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests’. They are not, and we must control them, for their own good. The same principle guides the business community. ibid.