Quotes on Mind Control, Education, Mass Media, Propaganda, etc. 

 

"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws." - Abraham Lincoln

"The great mass of people... will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one." Mein Kampf, volume 1, chapter. 3—1925 Adolf Hitler (1889â€"1945) German Dictator
 

"How fortunate for rulers that men do not think."  Adolf Hitler

"The ruling class has the schools and press under its thumb. This enables it to sway the emotions of the masses." Albert Einstein

"We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather." Barbara Ehrenreich

"Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think." Benjamin Disraeli

"Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities." Alan Bloom

"The notion that the church, the press, and the universities should serve the state is essentially a Communist notion. In a free society these institutions must be wholly free – which is to say that their function is to serve as checks upon the state." Alan Barth

"Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population." Albert Einstein

"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers…The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."  Aldous Huxley

"I believe Hollywood is the most effective and disastrous propaganda factory there has ever been in the history of human beings." BYU Speeches of the Year - November 13, 1961 Alistair Cooke (1908-2004) British-American Journalist

"We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe." American Library Association

"It is the mark of an educated man to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." Aristotle

"The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being." - Ashley Montagu, American anthropologist

"The battle of philosophers is a battle for men's minds. The nature of the enemy, those who seek to destroy America, seek to disarm it intellectually and physically. But this is not a political cause. It goes way beyond that. Politics is not the cause, but the last consequence of philosophical ideas." Ayn Rand addressing the 1974 graduating class of West Point

” … The global elite … cannot put all of us in concentration camps physically, hence the next most powerful form of imprisonment is within the mind. " - Azartush Najjarian,  Tehran Times
"Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." Benjamin Disraeli

"To tax the community for the advantage of a class is not protection, it is plunder." Benjamin Disraeli

"Upon the education of the people of this country, the fate of this country depends." Benjamin Disraeli

"Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." Benjamin Disraeli

"Whether it is television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books or the Internet, a few giant conglomerates are determining what we see, hear and read." "Congress Can No Longer Ignore Corporate Control of the Media," The Hill - June 12, 2002 Bernie Sanders (b. 1941) U.S. Representative, Vermont (I)

"[T]o proclaim a people free to choose their own government but then to insist that the government determine, through a government-controlled compulsory educational system, the very attitudes and values by which the people will choose becomes the most insidious and pernicious form of tyranny: it gives the people the illusion of freedom while all along controlling them through a form of governmental programming." Blair Adams, WHO OWNS THE CHILDREN? (1991), p. 46.

"To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas.” "We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests....The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of old people, these are the belated objectives ...for charting the changes in human behavior.” Brock Chisholm, 1959 Humanist of the Year and former head of World Health Organization, in the February 1946 issue of Psychiatry

"Most people know more about their congressmen via smear campaigns than they know about their own neighbor via conversations, and a lot of people know more about Britney Spears via tabloids than they know about their own congressmen via voting booklets. Does anyone else see the problem here?" Brock Fiant

"Believing is easier than thinking.  Hence so many more believers than thinkers."  Bruce Calvert

"The Rockefeller Foundation and the Council on Foreign Relations … intend to prevent, if they can, a repetition of what they call in the vernacular "the debunking journalistic campaign following World War I.” Translated into precise English, this means that the Foundation and the Council do not want journalists or any other persons to examine too closely and criticize too freely the official propaganda and official statements relative to "our basic aims and activities” during World War II. In short, they hope that, among other things, the policies and measures of Franklin D. Roosevelt will escape in the coming years the critical analysis, evaluation and exposition that befell the policies and measures of Woodrow Wilson and the Entente Allies after World War I." Charles Austin Beard

"Tyrants have not yet discovered any chains that can fetter the mind." Charles Caleb Colton

"We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists.... We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them. From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children's nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists." Communist Party Education Workers Congress

"It is vital that when educating our children's brains that we do not neglect to educate their hearts." Dalai Lama

"American [public] schools are failing because they are organized according to a bureaucratic, monopolistic model; their organizing principle is basically the same as that of a socialist economy." David Boaz

"We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is." David Boylan, Fox News, as quoted in Genetic Engineering, Food, and Our Environment, by Luke Anderson

"We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental Democratic doctrine that the largest individual liberty consistent with the rights of others insures the highest type of American citizenship and the best government." Democratic National Platform of 1892

"There are all kinds of devices invented for the protection and preservation of countries: defensive barriers, forts, trenches, and the like... But prudent minds have as a natural gift one safeguard which is the common possession of all, and this applies especially to the dealings of democracies. What is this safeguard? Skepticism. This you must preserve. This you must retain. If you can keep this, you need fear no harm." Demosthenes

"The foundation of every state is the education of its youth." Diogenes

"The propaganda system allows the U.S. Ieadership to commit crimes without limit and with no suggestion of misbehavior or criminality; in fact, major war criminals like Henry Kissinger appear regularly on TV to comment on the crimes of the derivative butchers." Edward Herman, Z magazine Dec 1999

"We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free." Epictetus

"The United States is not only number one in military power but also in the effectiveness of its propaganda system." - Edward S. Herman, political economist and author

"To become informed and hold government accountable, the general public needs to obtain news that is comprehensive yet interesting and understandable, that conveys facts and outcomes, not cosmetic images and airy promises. But that is not what the public demands." - Eric Alterman

"When watching men of [coercive political] power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual -- the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker -- and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable 'animated instrument' which is Aristotle's definition of a slave."  Eric Hoffer

"A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead." At London Conference of Foreign Ministers February 10, 1946 (quoted in The Barnes Review, volume 5, no. 3, p. 29, May 1999) Ernest Bevin (1881-1951) British Foreign Minister


"Governments have ever been known to hold a high hand over the education of the people. They know, better than anyone else, that their power is based almost entirely on the school. Hence, they monopolize it more and more." Francisco Ferrer

"Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts." Frank Zappa

"I find it hard to understand why those who demand Unitary Education by the State do not also demand a Unitary Press by the State… Either the State is infallible, in which case we could not do better than to submit to it the entire domain of intelligent thought, or it is not, in which case it is no more rational to hand over education to it than the press.”  Frederic Bastiat

"To educate a man is to unfit him to be a slave."  Frederick Douglass

"Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down." Frederick Douglass

 

"No mighty king, no ambitious emperor, no pope, or prophet ever dreamt of such an awesome pulpit, so potent a magic wand [television]." Fred W. Friendly
  "In individuals, insanity is rare; in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule"   Friedrich Nietzsche

"Either you think – or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"I wish there was a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence. There's a knob called "brightness", but it doesn't work." Gallagher

"You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind." Gandhi

"Government education has torn us from our moorings, our training has made us hug the very chains that bind us." Gandhi quoted in Gene Sharp, THE POLITICS OF NONVIOLENT ACTION (1973), p. 57.

"Those who know how to think need no teachers."  Gandhi

"We believe the picture painters of the mass media are artfully creating landscapes for us which deliberately hide the real picture." Gary Allen

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?... Has it ever occurred to your Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."  George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5

"We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull." George Orwell, 1984

"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking." George Patton

"That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction. To the extent that they are permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school they will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation.  It is my observation that the men and women who have affected the course of human events are those who have not hesitated to use the power that has come to them." Dr. George S. Counts (1889-1974) professor of education, Columbia University

"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." White House Press Conference May 24, 2005 George W. Bush

"As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read... But the Press is not free, the newspapers are owned by rich men." The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, chapter. 19 - 1949 George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Socialist Playwright

"A Party member lives from birth to death under the eye of the Thought Police.  Even when he is alone he can never be sure that he alone.. At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother.  Big Brother is infallible and all powerful.  Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration.”   George Orwell. 1984

"But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs." Gilbert Keith Chesterson
"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another." Gilbert Keith Chesterson

"What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves." Gilbert Keith Chesterson
"When you control opinion, as corporate America controls opinion in the United States by owning the media, you can make the masses believe almost anything you want, and guide them as you please.” Gore Vidal

"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda." The Origins of Totalitarianism, chapter 3 - 1951 Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) German Political Philosopher

"To teach the Rockefeller drug ideology, it is necessary to teach that Nature didn't know what she was doing when she made the human body".  Hans Ruesch

"Propaganda is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them." Harold Evans

"A new public mind is to be created. How? Only by creating tens of millions of individual minds and welding them into a new social mind. Old stereotypes must be broken up and 'new climates of opinion' formed in the neighborhoods of America ... Through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government one that will embrace all the activities of men, one that will postulate the need of scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people."  Dr Harold Ruggs, The Great Technology (1933)

"Through the schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government - one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people ... [This will be accomplished by] first and foremost, the development of a new philosophy of life and education which will be fully appropriate to the new social order; second, the building of an adequate plan for the production of a new race of educational workers; third, the making of new activities and materials for the curriculum."  Dr. Harold Ruggs

"The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think, and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought without fear." Helen H. Gardner

"College isn't the place to go for ideas." Helen Keller

"The New York Times is deliberately pitched to the liberal point of view." Herman Dismore

"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." H.L. Mencken

"The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are." H.L. Menchken, writing in Smart Set magazine, December 1919

"If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves." - Howard Zinn, historian and author

"The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason." Hunter S. Thompson

"But to manipulate men, to propel them toward goals which you – the social reformers – see, but they may not, is to deny their human essence, to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to degrade them." Isaiah Berlin

"School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is." Ivan Illich
  "Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open." Sir James Dewar

""For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction." Janet Frame

"Most Americans are so brainwashed by the time they complete twelve years of government education that they cannot even recognize mass murder by the U.S. government as a crime." Jeff Knaebel

"[A]ny provider that commands 90 percent of the market—whether we’re talking about software, phone service, or heating oil—is, by definition, a monopoly. Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn’t it strike anyone as strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal—as something that has always been and must always be? ... [C]ompetition forces public schools into making long-overdue repairs. And it offers poor parents the choices they desperately desire." Jennifer A. Grossman

"As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends." Jeremy Bentham

"The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society that is coming, where everyone would be interdependent.” 1899 John Dewey, educational philosopher, proponent of modern public schools.

"The teacher is engaged not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life.... In this way, the teacher always is the prophet of the true God and the usherer-in of the true Kingdom of God." John Dewey

"Of all the tyrannies on human kind / the worst is that which persecutes the mind." John Dryden

"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking." John Kenneth Galbraith

"I think we are destroying the minds of America and that has been one of my lifelong ambitions."  John Kricfalusi (creator of the Ren and Stimpy Show)

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it."  John Pilger

"A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, an aristocracy, or a majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body." John Stuart Mill, 1859

"The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, so what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. They pull the strings and we dance.” John Swinton, New York Times Chief of Staff

"Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents." John Taylor Gatto

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another." John Taylor Gatto

"School is the first impression children get of organized society. Like most first impressions it is the lasting one. Life is dull and stupid, only Coke provides relief. And other products, too, of course." John Taylor Gatto

"So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver: Obedient soldiers to the army; Obedient workers to the mines; Well subordinated civil servants to government; Well subordinated clerks to industry; Citizens who thought alike about major issues." John Taylor Gatto

"Who besides a degraded rabble would voluntarily present itself to be graded and classified like meat? No wonder school is compulsory." John Taylor Gatto

"Contempt, prior to complete investigation, enslaves men to ignorance."  Dr. John Whitman Ray

"We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated. ... The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. This lacks historical perspective. Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. This kind of liberal orientation has great appeal. We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brain." Dr. Jose Delgado

"During a war, news should be given out for instruction rather than information." Joseph Goebbels

"Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they are acting on their own free will." Joseph Gobbels

"Not every item of news should be published. Rather must those who control news policies endeavor to make every item of news serve a certain purpose."  Joseph Paul Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

"It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." Joseph Goebbels

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play." Joseph Goebbels, Propaganda Minister of the Nazi Regime 

"Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." Joseph Stalin

"Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas." Joseph Stalin

"Ideas are indeed the most dangerous weapons in the world. Our ideas of freedom are the most powerful political weapons man has ever forged." Justice William O. Douglas

"I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views – towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues – has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform…not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view." Justice William O. Douglas