Mass media

"The press does not tell us what to think, it tells us what to think about." Walter Lippmann

"In the United States, the majority takes on the task of supplying a multitude of ready-made opinions, freeing the individual from the necessity of forming his own." Alexis De Tocqueville

"The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his is a twofold job: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist." Edward Bernays

"Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos." Edward Bernays

"As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented." Edward Bernays

"We govern what the public think about." Edward Bernays

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier." H. L. Mencken

"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing." Philip K. Dick

"Mind control isn't hard to understand. If you do what the TV says, the TV is controlling your mind and you're not. 2 billion people just pushed an experimental medicine under their skin, which was never healthy, simply because the TV told them to. That's mind control." Unbekannt

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders." Edward L. Bernays

"Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought. Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a particular belief or doctrine." Edward L. Bernays

"Social connections were also transformed beyond recognition. The invention of radio and television led to the rise of the mass media and a corresponding decline in direct human interactions with a merely social function. Evening meetings between neighbors, pub gatherings, harvest festivals, rituals, and celebrations—they were progressively replaced by consumption of what the media presented." Mattias Desmet

"I am open to everything now. I'm open to things that I never thought I would have been open to. And I -- I really think that the door fully came open. I've realized that everything in the -- in the news is BS, everything. There's nothing that I can consume on any legacy media that I can trust. And that is shocking. And that's disturbing. And it makes you wonder how long it's been going on for. And I'm concerned, it might have been a very long time." David Drew Pinsky

"Language is an essential means of communication that countless people use to talk past each other." Peter Kilian