George Orwell on Power and Control
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
George Orwell
Author Archive for: Jan
Entries by Jan
Deliberate Deception and Misinformation – George Orwell on Propaganda
“The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.”
George Orwell
Political Language and Lies – George Orwell on Manipulation
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness… Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
George Orwell
Edward Bernays on Media, Opinion, and Invisible Government
“We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.”
Edward Bernays
George Orwell on Totalitarianism and Historical Revision
“A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened.”
George Orwell
The First Principle of a Civilized State – Walter Lippmann
“The first principle of a civilized state is that the power is legitimate only when it is under contract.”
Walter Lippmann
Walter Lippmann Quote on Democracy
“No amount of charters, direct primaries, or short ballots will make a democracy out of an illiterate people.”
Walter Lippmann
Opposition is Indispensable – Quote by Walter Lippmann
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opposition than from his fervent supporters.”
Walter Lippmann
Honest Leadership: Walter Lippmann on Truth and Servitude
“The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master’s ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.”
Walter Lippmann
Truth and Distortion in Mass Communication – Walter Lippmann
“When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.”
Walter Lippmann