“No group of sociologists can approximate the ad teams in the gathering and processing of exploitable social data. The ad teams have billions to spend annually on research and testing of reactions, and their products are magnificent accumulations of material about the shared experience and feelings of the entire community.”
Marshall McLuhan
“Publicity is the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject. The subjects of publicity include people (for example, politicians and performing artists), goods and services, organizations of all kinds, and works of art or entertainment.”
Marshall McLuhan
“In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.[….] Acceptance of the lesser evil is deliberately used to accustom officials, as well as the population at large, to accept the evil itself.”
Hannah Arendt
“We always give the public their heroes. We give the heroes to every faction, and then people once they hear this person say all the right things, we give releases to them because he or she speaks for ‘me’. We say go there go do that and they do it. We give our power to the authorized heroes.”
Albert Pike
“In regard to propaganda, the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
Aldous Huxley
“Give them a lying newspaper in the morning, let them work a lot during the day for little money and bring the latest manipulated news on TV in the evening, alternating with dumbed-down shows, movies and commercials. Thus they have no more time to think consciously.”
Unbekannt
“Impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses.”
Aldous Huxley
“Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence.”
Milton Friedman
“While the State exists, there can be no freedom. When there is freedom there will be no State.”
Wladimir Lenin