"No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community."
Marshall McLuhan
"Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public's perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment."
Marshall McLuhan
"We manipulate people like crazy in films and they love it. It’s a tremendous release. Every film composer mixes his experiences with a talent for musical manipulation, then projects that Machiavellian power gut to gut. The big thing about sexy music is the power of suggestion. A song with a porno lyric may cause laughter or embarrassment, but never an invitation to the bedroom. Sensual singing, an insistent beat that builds, suggestive lyrics — these are what turn people on today. One of the biggest motivations in record sales is the bedroom lure, which record companies all know about. Music is used everywhere to condition the human mind. Hitler used Wagner to win the German masses to Naziism. Our future music may be a frequency machine feeding impulses to our nervous system through electrodes or the ear, giving us highs and lows more powerful than any drugs in use today. And much more dangerous, too, because nobody takes musical manipulation very seriously."
Eddy Lawrence Manson
"In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.[....] Acceptance of the lesser evil is deliberately used to accustom officials, as well as the population at large, to accept the evil itself."
Hannah Arendt
"The cavalier expression of such sentiments, the resurrection of a dormant specter from the crypt of America’s “cold war” with the former Soviet Union, is meant purely to foster the viral spread of collective apprehension in the fragile heart of the population which, over the centuries, has proved to be the Jesuit order’s most effective tool in the execution of psychological warfare, economic and political transformation (AKA order out of chaos), and social behavioral modification. Turns out, the looming threat of annihilation at the hands of “nuclear weapons” or viral infection due to the Covid-19 “pandemic” are both hoaxes."
Stephen C. Perkins
"We always give the public their heroes. We give the heroes to every faction, and then people once they hear this person say all the right things, we give releases to them because he or she speaks for ‘me’. We say go there go do that and they do it. We give our power to the authorized heroes."
Albert Pike
"One of the most significant moments for me in my professional career, apart from being sworn in as an attorney, was signing my first - also successful - constitutional complaint. It pains me to no longer be able to trust Germany's highest court in a fundamental way."
Jessica Hamed
"Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet."
Edward Bernays
"In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions."
Aldous Huxley
"Inflation does not come upon us as a curse or as a tragic fate; it is always caused by reckless or even criminal policies."
Ludwig Erhard
"Give them a lying newspaper in the morning, let them work a lot during the day for little money and bring the latest manipulated news on TV in the evening, alternating with dumbed-down shows, movies and commercials. Thus they have no more time to think consciously."
Autor Unbekannt
"The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today. It is a great distributor for ideas and opinions. The motion picture can standardize the ideas and habits of a nation. Because pictures are made to meet market demands, they reflect, emphasize and even exaggerate broad popular tendencies, rather than stimulate new ideas and opinions. The motion picture avails itself only of ideas and facts which are in vogue. As the newspaper seeks to purvey news, it seeks to purvey entertainment."
Edward Bernays
"More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States."
Thomas Sowell
"My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents."
Carl Gustav Jung
"Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses."
Aldous Huxley
"The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence."
Mahatma Gandhi
"Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."
Milton Friedman
"While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State."
Vladimir Lenin
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be."
Thomas Jefferson
"Political and economic power in the United States is concentrated in the hands of a “ruling elite” that controls most of U.S.-based multinational corporations, major communication media, the most influential foundations, major private universities and most public utilities. Founded in 1921, the Council of Foreign Relations is the key link between the large corporations and the federal government. It has been called a “school for statesmen” and “comes close to being an organ of what C. Wright Mills has called the Power Elite – a group of men, similar in interest and outlook shaping events from invulnerable positions behind the scenes. The creation of the United Nations was a Council project, as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank."
Steve Jacobson
"That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. . . . as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power. . . . Under the impact of propaganda, not necessarily in the sinister meaning of the word alone, the old constants of our thinking have become variables. It is no longer possible, for example, to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify. It has been demonstrated that we cannot rely upon intuition, conscience, or the accidents of casual opinion if we are to deal with the world beyond our reach."
Walter Lippmann
"It is with knowledge of the human being, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his automatisms as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical psychology that propaganda refines its techniques."
Jacques Ellul
"These organizations represent the collective interests of the largest corporations on earth. They not only retain armies of policy wonks and researchers to articulate their agenda and form a consensus internally, but also use their massive accumulation of unwarranted influence in media, industry, and finance to manufacture a self-serving consensus internationally. To believe that this corporate-financier oligarchy would subject their agenda and fate to the whims of the voting masses is naive at best. They have painstakingly ensured that no matter who gets into office, in whatever country, the guns, the oil, the wealth and the power keep flowing perpetually into their own hands. [....] The real revolution will commence when we identify the above equation as the true brokers of power and when we begin systematically removing our dependence on them, and their influence on us from our daily lives. The global corporate-financier oligarchy needs us, we do not need them, independence from them is the key to our freedom."
Tony Cartalucci
"It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society."
Jacques Ellul
"But what could make democracy attractive to the powerful, whose very power it limits and threatens? The answer is quite simple: Nothing! For democracy means precisely to restrict the power needs of the powerful and the rich, in which they naturally have no interest. This now results in a tension between the needs of the rulers to stabilize their status and our need to feel socially autonomous and self-determined with regard to our social situation. In history, this fundamental tension has often been discharged in the form of revolutions. From the point of view of the rulers, how can this tension be defused if we want to avoid bloody revolutions?
The solution lies in 'satisfying' the citizens' need for freedom with a surrogate, with a substitute drug, namely the illusion of democracy. To create such an illusion of democracy, one needs above all - and this is where the herd metaphor comes into play again - an ideology of justification that justifies why the people are immature and in need of leadership. Furthermore, the idea of democracy, which is so attractive to the people, must be emptied of its meaning so that it is limited only to an electoral act. And finally, continuous democracy management is needed to ensure that the people want what they are supposed to want in the act of voting."
Prof. Rainer Mausfeld
"It’s about what you would expect from a bipartisan democracy campaign — it’s an attempt to impose what is called democracy, meaning rule by the rich and the powerful, without interference by the mob but within the framework of formal electoral procedures."
Noam Chomsky
"Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will."
Gustave de Molinari
"The fact that there is a gap between journalists and the public is shown above all by the fact that the former are much more interested in the opinion of their colleagues than in the judgment of their readers. Compare this with a healthy system, for example that of restaurants. As we [...] have seen, restaurant owners care about the opinions of their diners, not those of other restaurant owners, which keeps restaurant owners doing what their job is; it prevents the industry as a whole from moving away from diners' interests. In addition, skin in the game creates diversity, and monoculture is prevented. Economic uncertainty exacerbates the situation. Journalists currently work in the most insecure profession imaginable: the majority live hand-to-mouth, and ostracism by colleagues would be fatal. This makes them easy victims for manipulative lobbyists, as has been seen in connection with genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the wars in Syria, and more. In this profession, if you say something unpopular about Brexit, GMOs, or Putin, you're toast. It's the exact opposite of professions where being a follower is punished."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb