Mass media

"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." Edwin Rodman Serling

"There are laws to protect the freedom of the press’s speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press." Mark Twain

"Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government." Edward Bernays

"All great truths begin as blasphemies" George Bernard Shaw

"Numbing the senses by monotonously repeating an assertion is a key element in utilizing mind control techniques." Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Ready made opinions can be distributed day by day through the press, radio, and so on, again and again, till they reach the nerve cell and implant a fixed pattern in the brain. Consequently, guided public opinion is the result, according to Pavlovian theoreticians, of good propaganda technique, and the polls [are] a verification of the temporary successful action of the Pavlovian machinations on the mind." Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Continual suggestion and slow hypnosis in the wake of mechanical mass communication promotes uniformity of the mind and may lure the public into the "happy era" of adjustment, integration and equalization, in which individual opinion is completely stereotyped (or strawmanned/made a caricature of)." Joost A.M. Meerloo

"The continual intrusion into our minds of the hammering noises of arguments and propaganda can lead to two kinds of reactions. It may lead to apathy and indifference, the I-don't-care reaction, or to a more intensified desire to study and to understand. Unfortunately, the first reaction is the more popular one." Joost A.M. Meerloo

"Confusing a targeted audience is one of the necessary ingredients for effective mind control." Joost A.M. Meerloo

"He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses" Joost A.M. Meerloo

"The media may constitute the most powerful education system ever known to man." Fred Fedler

"[...] All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.[...] All media are extensions of some human faculty — psychic or physical. [...] Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act—the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change, men change.[...]" Marshall McLuhan

"The function of news is to signalize an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality on which men can act." Walter Lippmann

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents." Marilyn Monroe