"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."
Gustave Le Bon
"Zelensky's intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called "staging": a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder."
Jean-Luc Godard | "Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics..."
"If it is not in the media... it did not happen. If it did not happen, but is in the media... we believe it has happened."
Charles T. Tart
"The American people don't believe anything until they see it on television."
Richard Nixon
"If people continue to allow themselves to be talked into believing yesterday's lies as today's truths, then tomorrow's whip will make them painfully aware, too late, of the dangers that laziness of thought has in its wake."
Erich Limpach
"Being a "conspiracy theorist" is spending endless hours for years & years gathering as much information as possible from as many resources as possible and critically thinking about what that information means then having people who do nothing but watch TV tell you you're crazy."
Just.A.Thought
"We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first."
Charles MacKay
"I’ve made a lot of mistakes, I’ve been wrong many times but I’m beginning to think I’m right about this: the mainstream media is not your friend, the culture is not your friend, the government is not your friend, big business is not your friend. They are operating collegiately in unison to create a set of systems that are beneficial to them and disadvantage you."
Russel Brand
"...a drifting apart of public opinion and published opinion when the selection rules of the journalists who have been brought into line largely coincide. This creates a consonance of reporting that acts like a confirmation to the audience (everyone says it, so it has to be right) and installs a stereotype-supported pseudo-environment"
Walter Lippmann
"The leading media as well as the mass media are business models and serve no more to convey "truth" than the pharmaceutical industry serves to promote public health. Indoctrination is part of the essence of media."
Prof. Rainer Mausfeld
"In the portrayal of political processes, I often see a certain political one-sidedness. For example, when it comes to the topics of ecology or Europeanization, critics are always put in the right-wing corner. [....] The broadcasters adopt government lines in an undifferentiated manner. ARD and ZDF are increasingly acting as an acclamation forum for politics."
Professor Christoph Degenhart
"Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth."
Erich Fromm
"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind simply has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent."
John Edgar Hoover
"He is free to evade reality, he is free to unfocus his mind and stumble blindly down any road he pleases, but not free to avoid the abyss he refuses to see."
Ayn Rand
"We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."
Edward Osborne Wilson
"The CIA controls everyone of significance in the major media, where it spent about 30% of its budget on covered press personnel and programs"
William Egan Colby
"The masses are never militaristic until their minds are poisoned by propaganda."
Albert Einstein
"The holders of authority and those who take advantage of it must convince people of this fiction and put to sleep their realistic, that is to say, critical, faculty of thought. Every thinking person knows the methods of propaganda, methods by which critical judgment is destroyed and the mind is lulled until it submits to clichés that stultify people because they make them dependent, depriving them of the ability to trust their eyes and their judgment. This function, in which they believe, blinds them to reality."
Erich Fromm
"Every four years it elects the Bundestag. The lists or persons submitted to it by the parties are already elected beforehand by the parties. The process of this hidden preliminary election, which is the actual election, is convoluted; the names for the constituency lists and the state lists are not drawn up in the same way. But it is always the party committees, never the people, who would be involved in this decisive beginning. One must be a party member in order to participate somewhere in this election and to be able to be set up. Even those who are party members, as such, have little effect in the nominations. The decisive factor is the party hierarchy and bureaucracy.[...] Even the elections are not really elections, but acclamations to the party oligarchy. [....] The parties, which should by no means be the state, make themselves, withdrawn from the life of the people, the state [....] The governance of the state is in the hands of the party oligarchy [....] Their position, not limited by any tension to other power, seduces [....] the parties to want to occupy the seats by their own people. This is the reward for party work, the spoils of victory after the electoral battle [....]"
Karl Jaspers
"The German language as a cultural asset belongs to all of us. No one has a right to tamper with it. I wonder how a politically motivated minority comes to want to dictate to a majority how we want to express ourselves in the future. This unspeakable ,'gendern' is absurd and rather supervised speech."
Dieter Hallervorden
"Whoever comes to power has passed through a filter that does not let decent people pass."
Ljudmila Ulitzkaya
"I think it looks so ridiculous and impossible, you can tell it's real because it looks so fake, honestly. We'd have way better CGI if it was fake. The colors all look kind of weird in space. There's no atmospheric occlusion; everything's too crisp. It's just literally a normal car in space — I kind of like the absurdity of that, it's kind of silly and fun, but I think that silly, fun things are important … I think the imagery of it is something that's going to get people excited around the world, and it's still tripping me out. I'm tripping balls here."
Elon Musk
"The empire still fears the public. If it didn't it wouldn't bother rolling out so much propaganda ahead of all its depraved actions—it would just act. They work so hard to manufacture our consent because they're still afraid of what we'll do to them if we decide we don't consent."
Caitlin Johnstone
"Of course, we live in a completely corrupted world where every government is just a bunch of businessmen working for a bunch of bigger businessmen and none of them give a shit about the people. The sad fact is no one knows how to change it, because no one knows how to take on the corporations. So I guess we’re stuck with this system until the oil runs out."
Woody Harrelson
"If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them."
George Orwell
„They feed you the stuff every day on TV and you think it's all different, don't you? All the time, right? And it's always the same. Jesus i can't go on anywhere you know“
Lemmy Kilmister