“The most powerful figment of the imagination is public opinion: no one knows exactly who makes it, no one has ever met it personally, but everyone lets themselves be tyrannized by it!”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“This newspaper is an organ of infamy. It is wrong to read it. Someone who contributes to this newspaper is absolutely unacceptable socially. It would be wrong to be friendly or even polite to one of its editors. One must be as unkind to them as the law will just allow. They are bad people who do wrong.”
Max Goldt
“I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all, frighten people, and secondly, demoralise them. […] An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern. And I think there’s an element in the thinking of some people… ‘We don’t want people to be educated, healthy and confident, because they would get out of control.'”
Anthony ‚Tony‘ Neil Wedgwood Benn
“What do you think would be going on here if more people realized what was going on?”
Volker Pispers
“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.”
Gustave Le Bon
“Zelensky’s intervention at the Cannes festival goes without saying if you look at it from the angle of what is called “staging”: a bad actor, a professional comedian, under the eye of other professionals in their own professions. I believe I must have said something along these lines a long time ago. It therefore took the staging of yet another world war and the threat of another catastrophe for us to know that Cannes is a propaganda tool like any other. They propagate Western aesthetics whilst thinking it is not a big deal, but it is just that. The truth of the images is only advancing slowly. Now imagine that the war itself is this aesthetic deployed during a world festival, whose stakeholders are the states in conflict, or rather “interests”, broadcasting representations of which we are all spectators for… you, like me. We often say “conflict of interest”, which is a tautology. There is no conflict, big or small, unless there is interest. Brutus, Nero, Biden, or Putin, Constantinople, Iraq or Ukraine, not much has changed, apart from the mass murder.”
Jean-Luc Godard
“If it is not in the media… it did not happen. If it did not happen, but is in the media… we believe it has happened.”
Charles T. Tart