Quotes about propaganda

Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.

— Jean Anouilh

Some of mankind's most terrible misdeeds have been committed under the spell of certain magic words or phrases.

— James B. Conant

Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies.

— Francis Cornford

Propaganda has a bad name, but its root meaning is simply to disseminate through a medium, and all writing therefore is propaganda for something. It's a seeding of the self in the consciousness of others.

— Elizabeth Drew

All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.

— Terry Eagleton

We have made the Reich by propaganda.

— Paul Joseph Goebbels

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

— Eric Hoffer

Propaganda, to be effective, must be believed. To be believed, it must be credible. To be credible, it must be true.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

Today the world is the victim of propaganda because people are not intellectually competent. More than anything the United States needs effective citizens competent to do their own thinking.

— William Mather Lewis

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

The successor to politics will be propaganda. Propaganda, not in the sense of a message or ideology, but as the impact of the whole technology of the times.

— Marshall Mcluhan

Propaganda replaces moral philosophy.

— Hans J. Morgenthau

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

— Bertrand Russell

A propagandist is a specialist in selling attitudes and opinions.

— Hans Speier

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

— Virginia Woolf