Mass media

"The foulest damage to our political life comes not from the 'secrets' which they hide from us, but from the little bits of half-truth and disinformation which they do tell us. These are already pre-digested, and then are sicked up as little gobbits of authorised spew. The columns of defence correspondents in the establishment sheets serve as the spittoons" E. P. Thompson

"The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you’ve got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus." Noam Chomsky

"In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness." Hannah Arendt

"Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse." Mark Twain

"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." Mark Crispin Miller

"The press is our chief ideological weapon" Nikita Khrushchev

"Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state." David McGowan

"I, on the other hand, would explicitly call for social disadvantages at this point for all those who voluntarily forego vaccination. May the entire republic point the finger at them." Nikolaus Blome

"A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself." Joseph Pulitzer

"This is the plague of our time: the mad lead the blind." William Shakespeare

"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution." W. Lance Bennett

"What if your eyes and your ability to think critically and independently tell you that all information from the institutions of the state is a lie? What do you do then? Do you trust your own cognitive abilities or blindly follow authority pretending everything can be somehow explained? If your worldview cannot explain what you see with your own eyes, then the problem is probably with your worldview. So, do you change this view or deny it?" David McGowan

"Governments love pandemics, & they love pandemics for the same reasons they love war. Because it gives them the possibility of imposing controls on the population that the latter would never accept otherwise." Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"The public is practically unaware of the overwhelming responsibility carried by the Vatican and its Jesuits in the starting of the two world wars – a situation which may be explained in part by the gigantic finances at the disposition of the Vatican and its Jesuits, giving them power in so many spheres, especially since the last conflict." Edmond Paris