Mass Media Quotes – Perspectives on Communication and Society

"TIME: Was there a particular kind of terrorism in Germany associated with Baader, Meinhof, and the others?

Helmut Schmidt: I suspect that all forms of terrorism—whether Germany’s RAF, Italy’s Brigate Rosse, the French, the Irish, the Spanish, or Arab groups—differ little in their contempt for human life. They are surpassed by certain forms of state terrorism.

TIME: Are you serious? Who do you mean?

Helmut Schmidt: Let’s leave it at that. But I do mean what I’m saying."

Helmut Schmidt

"Time and again, we also find ourselves noticing that we live in a country that is deeply ill—in a landscape of lies—and that there are people at every level of education who will lie to the very end."

Joachim Gauck

"You can protect a society, you can protect an economy, and you can even protect personal relationships to death."

Prof. Ferdinand Kirchhof

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell

"Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is mob rule—incited by demagogues and steered in an unstable manner. German democracy in particular displays traits of a soft totalitarianism, marked by pervasive self-censorship that is often scarcely even recognized as such."

Prof. Hans Hermann Hoppe

"We have a chancellor who is a liar."

Christian Olearius

"As proposals for action along new lines arise to compete for the moral and physical support of masses, propaganda attains eminence as the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery or other possible control techniques."

Harold D. Lasswell

"Nothing appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers."

David Hume

"The power structures that have emerged are not democratically legitimized, and they can no longer be voted out of office through any electoral process. The most important power structures in our society are no longer accessible to the voter at all… and one does not want the ordinary citizen to even know that they exist. They are meant to remain invisible within the framework of public debate."

Prof. Rainer Mausfeld

"The fundamental problem with our democracy is that it is not one. The people—the nominal ruler and sovereign—have, in reality, nothing to say. … Behind the democratic façade, a system has been installed in which completely different rules apply than those of the Basic Law. The system is undemocratic and corrupt; it abuses power and unscrupulously deceives citizens. … Every German is free to obey laws to which he has never consented; he may admire the majesty of the Basic Law, whose validity he has never legitimized; he is free to pay homage to politicians whom no citizen has ever elected, and to provide for them lavishly—with his tax money, about the use of which he has never been consulted. Overall, the state and politics are in a condition of which only professional optimists or hypocrites can claim it has arisen from the will of the citizens."

Prof. Dr. Hans Herbert von Arnim

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result."

Albert Einstein

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas."

Josef Stalin

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Henry Louis Mencken

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke

"The fight against the far right has increasingly turned into a fight against one’s own people."

Uwe Heinz Steimle

"Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to control the public mind"

Noam Chomsky

"A life that is unwilling to take risks inevitably begins to resemble death."

Robert Pfaller