Quotes on Mind Control, Education, Mass Media, Propaganda, etc.
"Truth and news are not the same thing." Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post
"During my training I was trained in Psycho-politics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health." Kenneth Goff
"[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused." Laurie Garrett
"A psychopolitician must work hard to produce the maximum chaos in the fields of 'mental healing.' you must work until every teacher of psychology unknowingly or knowingly teaches only communist doctrine under the guise of 'psychology.' you must labour until every doctor and psychiatrist is either a psychopolitician or an unwitting assistant to our aims. You must labour until we have dominion of the minds and bodies of every important person in [America] You must work until suicide arising from mental imbalance is common and calls forth no general investigation or remark ... you must dominate as respected men the fields of psychiatry and psychology. You must dominate the hospitals and universities ... you can come and take your instructions as worshippers of Freud ... psychopolitics is a solemn charge. With it, you can erase our enemies as insects. You [psychologists] can change their [leaders] loyalties by psychopolitics. Given a short time with a psychopolitician you can alter forever the loyalty of a soldier ... or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind. Use the courts ... the judges ... the constitution ... its medical societies and its laws to further our ends ... by psychopolitics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And bring to earth, through communism, the greatest peace man has ever known." Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953), Jewish-Russian Bolshevik, Head of the Lenin School of Psychopolitics
"During my training I was trained in Psycho-politics. This was the art of capturing the minds of a nation through brainwashing and fake mental health." Kenneth Goff
"[W]hat suffers in the atmosphere of immediacy is analysis. What suffers in this search for speed is depth. The media in the wealthy world are becoming increasingly simplistic, superficial, and celebrity-focused." Laurie Garrett
"A psychopolitician must work hard to produce the maximum chaos in the fields of 'mental healing.' you must work until every teacher of psychology unknowingly or knowingly teaches only communist doctrine under the guise of 'psychology.' you must labour until every doctor and psychiatrist is either a psychopolitician or an unwitting assistant to our aims. You must labour until we have dominion of the minds and bodies of every important person in [America] You must work until suicide arising from mental imbalance is common and calls forth no general investigation or remark ... you must dominate as respected men the fields of psychiatry and psychology. You must dominate the hospitals and universities ... you can come and take your instructions as worshippers of Freud ... psychopolitics is a solemn charge. With it, you can erase our enemies as insects. You [psychologists] can change their [leaders] loyalties by psychopolitics. Given a short time with a psychopolitician you can alter forever the loyalty of a soldier ... or a statesman or a leader in his own country, or you can destroy his mind. Use the courts ... the judges ... the constitution ... its medical societies and its laws to further our ends ... by psychopolitics create chaos. Leave a nation leaderless. Kill our enemies. And bring to earth, through communism, the greatest peace man has ever known." Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria (1899-1953), Jewish-Russian Bolshevik, Head of the Lenin School of Psychopolitics
"The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets." Lawrence Grossman - longtime head of PBS and NBC News
"I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State." Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius
"Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children." Malcolm X
"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." Mark Crispin Miller
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." Mark Twain
"I claim for the nation an education that depends only on the State, because children of the State must be raised by members of the State." Louis-René de Caradeuc de La Chalotais
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius
"Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children." Malcolm X
"Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth." Mark Crispin Miller
"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed." Mark Twain
"In all countries, in all centuries, the primary reason for government to set up schools is to undermine the politically weak by convincing their children that the leaders are good and their policies are wise. The core is religious intolerance. The sides simply change between the Atheists, Catholics, Protestants, Unitarians, etc., depending whether you are talking about the Soviet Union, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, America, etc. A common second reason is to prepare the boys to go to war and the girls to cheer them on." Marshall Fritz
"Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds, appointed to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck
"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state." Max Victor Belz
"The first freedom of every human is freedom of the mind, the great free will. Essential to this is education. Mankind must accept education as an individual responsibility. Turning over the responsibility for your personal education to another is to surrender your free will. By controlling what you can learn, others control you as neatly as a shepherd herds sheep. If mankind cannot accept the personal responsibility for self education, then I am wrong and mankind deserves to be treated as sheep, both shorn and slaughtered, while in the interim herded by a few smart dogs that lick the shepherd’s hands. The second freedom of every human is to rise up against oppression, whether it comes from the lowly hands of a common thief or from the high hands of the so called sovereigns." - Michael C. Keehn
"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religions destroy spirituality." Michael Ellner
"[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own." Milovan Djilas
"Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful." Neal Boortz
"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?" Neal Boortz
"The most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated." Neal Boortz
"Boredom, anxiety, rejection, fear, envy, sloth -- in TV commercials there are remedies for each of these, and more. The remedies are called Scope, Comet, Toyota, Bufferin, Alka-Seltzer, and Budweiser. They take the place of good works, restraint, piety, awe, humility, and transcendence." Neil Postman, How to Watch TV News
"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing." Neil Postman
"For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade." Noam Chomsky
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media." Noam Chomsky
"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments." Noam Chomsky
"If you want to understand how a particular society works, you have to understand who makes the decisions that determine the way a society functions. In the U.S., the major decisions over what happens in a society (investment, production, distribution, etc.) are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations, conglomerates, and investment firms. They're also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government, and they're the ones who own the media, and are the ones who are in the position to make decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens, what's done in this society." Noam Chomsky
"I'm helping people develop intellectual self-defense... I don't mean go to school, because you're not going to get it there... It means that you have to develop an independent mind, and work on it. That's extremely hard to do alone... The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone. Some people can, but it's pretty rare. The way to do it is through organization." Noam Chomsky
"In a totalitarian state, it doesn't matter what people think, since the government can control people by force using a bludgeon. But when you can't control people by force, you have to control what people think, and the standard way to do this is via propaganda (manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions), marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy of some fashion." Noam Chomsky
"It's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector." - Noam Chomsky
"The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus." Noam Chomsky
"Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment." Norman Dorsen
"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers." Oscar Callaway
"I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition. The average high school child acquires a high school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all other myths of alleged history. When I was one of the editors of The Nation in the twenties, I wrote an editorial explaining that golf and intelligence were the two primary reasons that men did not attend church. Perhaps today I would say golf and a high school diploma." Paul Blanchard
"The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface. Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars." Paul Joseph Watson
"The media are less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalist perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions." Paul Weaver, 1994
"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who cares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool." - Plato
"Propaganda is.. the deliberate attempt by some individual or group to form, control, or alter the attitudes of other groups by the use of instruments of communication, with the intention that in any given situation the reaction of those so influence will be that desired by the propagandist." - Qualter
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories." Ray Bradbury
"To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity – and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state – is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism." Richard Goldstein
"Television was our chief tool in selling our policy." Richard Haass
"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman." Richard M. Ebeling
"Public schooling often ends up to be little more than majoritarian domination of minority viewpoints." Robert B. Everhart
"The truth is there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the "devil" only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US." Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Inter-Services Intelligence
"In the United States, both the upper levels of the Republican and Democratic Parties are in the pay of the corporate media and communication giants." - Robert McChesney and John Nichols, media critics and authors
"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." - Rubin Frank, former president NBC News
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." Sally Kempton
"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands." Spiro Agnew
"Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press… There is room for all of us – and for our divergent views – under the First Amendment." Spiro Agnew
"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?" Stephen Arons
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." - Steve Biko
"Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students." Steve Dasbach
"We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside of the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth." Terrence McKenna
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master." Thomas Hodgskin
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." Thomas Jefferson, 1824
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain." Dr. Thomas Sowell
"It's not until an event, institution, thought, principle, or movement, crosses the media threshold that it becomes real to us." Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives
"[The public school system:] Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." Walter Karp
"The news and truth are not the same thing." - Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974
"A dying laisser-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the 'owners,' must be subjected to a large degree of social control ... An equitable distribution of income will be sought ... [And] the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual [indoctrination, social engineering] it must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order." Willard Givens, 33 degree Freemason, for 17 years executive secretary of the National Education Association (NEA)
"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." - William Blum - Rogue State, on how governments control their citizens
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." William Colby
"Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen." William E. Borah
"Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure." William E. Hocking
"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison." William Glasser
"Government will not fail to employ education to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions." William Godwin
"Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility." William Godwin
"I want to make one thing clear. This war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here—in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day—while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones—changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money—for such outrageous "orientation” of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?" William Jenner
"I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it." The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 247-248 - 1959 William L. Shirer (1904-1993) Journalist and Historian
"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies." Justice William O. Douglas
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.” U.S. Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, 1889
"A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools." William Z Foster, Chairman of the Communist Party USA, Towards a Soviet America (1932)
"A dying laisser-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the 'owners,' must be subjected to a large degree of social control ... An equitable distribution of income will be sought ... [And] the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual [indoctrination, social engineering] it must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order." Willard Givens, 33 degree Freemason, for 17 years executive secretary of the National Education Association (NEA)
"Remarkably virtually everyone in developed countries desperately tries to believe that they are immune to indoctrination. They think for themselves and readily know the difference between truth and falsity, fantasy and reality, superstition and science, fact and fiction. Technologically sophisticated cultures are conditioned to accept belief systems, behaviors, and values that would have been rejected out of hand by their stone-age predecessors. Primitives would instantly sense the obvious threats to survival and adjustment, or simple nonsense, inherent in many of the treasured beliefs of modern society." Wilson Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation
"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution." W. Lance Bennett
"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them." Franklin P. Adams
"Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds, appointed to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck
"I don't want my children fed or clothed by the state, but if I had to choose, I would prefer that to their being educated by the state." Max Victor Belz
"The first freedom of every human is freedom of the mind, the great free will. Essential to this is education. Mankind must accept education as an individual responsibility. Turning over the responsibility for your personal education to another is to surrender your free will. By controlling what you can learn, others control you as neatly as a shepherd herds sheep. If mankind cannot accept the personal responsibility for self education, then I am wrong and mankind deserves to be treated as sheep, both shorn and slaughtered, while in the interim herded by a few smart dogs that lick the shepherd’s hands. The second freedom of every human is to rise up against oppression, whether it comes from the lowly hands of a common thief or from the high hands of the so called sovereigns." - Michael C. Keehn
"Just look at us. Everything is backwards; everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the major media destroy information, and religions destroy spirituality." Michael Ellner
"[Tyranny is] to compel men not to think as they do, to compel men to express thoughts that are not their own." Milovan Djilas
"Government schools will teach children that government is wonderful." Neal Boortz
"How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority of superior officers? Well, why should we then expect government schools to teach children to question the authority of government?" Neal Boortz
"The most widespread form of child abuse in the United States is parents' sending children to the government to be educated." Neal Boortz
"Boredom, anxiety, rejection, fear, envy, sloth -- in TV commercials there are remedies for each of these, and more. The remedies are called Scope, Comet, Toyota, Bufferin, Alka-Seltzer, and Budweiser. They take the place of good works, restraint, piety, awe, humility, and transcendence." Neil Postman, How to Watch TV News
"Television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation... Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing." Neil Postman
"For the totalitarian mind, adherence to state propaganda does not suffice: one must display proper enthusiasm while marching in the parade." Noam Chomsky
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media." Noam Chomsky
"For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we sere as willing or unwitting instruments." Noam Chomsky
"If you want to understand how a particular society works, you have to understand who makes the decisions that determine the way a society functions. In the U.S., the major decisions over what happens in a society (investment, production, distribution, etc.) are in the hands of a relatively concentrated network of major corporations, conglomerates, and investment firms. They're also the ones who staff the major executive positions in the government, and they're the ones who own the media, and are the ones who are in the position to make decisions. They have an overwhelmingly dominant role in the way life happens, what's done in this society." Noam Chomsky
"I'm helping people develop intellectual self-defense... I don't mean go to school, because you're not going to get it there... It means that you have to develop an independent mind, and work on it. That's extremely hard to do alone... The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone. Some people can, but it's pretty rare. The way to do it is through organization." Noam Chomsky
"In a totalitarian state, it doesn't matter what people think, since the government can control people by force using a bludgeon. But when you can't control people by force, you have to control what people think, and the standard way to do this is via propaganda (manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusions), marginalizing the general public or reducing them to apathy of some fashion." Noam Chomsky
"It's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize public support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector." - Noam Chomsky
"The media want to maintain their intimate relation to state power. They want to get leaks, they want to get invited to the press conferences. They want to rub shoulders with the Secretary of State, all that kind of business. To do that, you've got to play the game, and playing the game means telling their lies, serving as their disinformation apparatus." Noam Chomsky
"Free speech is essential to education, especially to a liberal education, which encourages the search for truths in art and science. If expression is restricted, the range of inquiry is also curtailed... The beneficiaries of a free society have a duty to pursue the truth and to protect the freedom of expression that makes possible the search for a new enlightenment." Norman Dorsen
"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers." Oscar Callaway
"I think the most important factor moving us toward a secular society has been the educational factor. Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition. The average high school child acquires a high school education, and this militates against Adam and Eve and all other myths of alleged history. When I was one of the editors of The Nation in the twenties, I wrote an editorial explaining that golf and intelligence were the two primary reasons that men did not attend church. Perhaps today I would say golf and a high school diploma." Paul Blanchard
"The fact is that the modern implementation of the prison planet has far surpassed even Orwell's 1984 and the only difference between our society and those fictionalized by Huxley, Orwell and others, is that the advertising techniques used to package the propaganda are a little more sophisticated on the surface. Yet just a quick glance behind the curtain reveals that the age old tactics of manipulation of fear and manufactured consensus are still being used to force humanity into accepting the terms of its own imprisonment and in turn policing others within the prison without bars." Paul Joseph Watson
"The media are less a window on reality than a stage on which officials and journalist perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions." Paul Weaver, 1994
"Strange times are these in which we live when old and young are taught in falsehood's school. And the one man who cares to tell the truth is called at once a lunatic and fool." - Plato
"Propaganda is.. the deliberate attempt by some individual or group to form, control, or alter the attitudes of other groups by the use of instruments of communication, with the intention that in any given situation the reaction of those so influence will be that desired by the propagandist." - Qualter
"We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories." Ray Bradbury
"To subject an artist’s work to a litmus test of political probity – and to punish institutions that will not carry out the mandate of the state – is to traffic in the thought control that gave us Stalinism and Nazism." Richard Goldstein
"Television was our chief tool in selling our policy." Richard Haass
"In the hands of the state, compulsory public education becomes a tool for political control and manipulation -- a prime instrument for the thought police of the society. And precisely because every child passes through the same indoctrination process -- learning the same "official history," the same "civic virtues," the same lessons of obedience and loyalty to the state -- it becomes extremely difficult for the independent soul to free himself from the straightjacket of the ideology and values the political authorities wish to imprint upon the population under its jurisdiction. For the communists, it was the class struggle and obedience to the Party and Comrade Stalin; for the fascists, it was worship of the nation -- state and obedience to the Duce; for the Nazis, it was race purity and obedience to the Fuhrer. The content has varied, but the form has remained the same. Through the institution of compulsory state education, the child is to be molded like wax into the shape desired by the state and its educational elite. We should not believe that because ours is a freer, more democratic society, the same imprinting procedure has not occurred even here, in America. Every generation of school-age children has imprinted upon it a politically correct ideology concerning America's past and the sanctity of the role of the state in society. Practically every child in the public school system learns that the "robber barons" of the 19th century exploited the common working man; that unregulated capitalism needed to be harnessed by enlightened government regulation beginning in the Progressive era at the turn of the century; that wild Wall Street speculation was a primary cause of the Great Depression; that only Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal saved America from catastrophe; and that American intervention in foreign wars has been necessary and inevitable, with the United States government required to be a global leader and an occasional world policeman." Richard M. Ebeling
"Public schooling often ends up to be little more than majoritarian domination of minority viewpoints." Robert B. Everhart
"The truth is there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the "devil" only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US." Former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, Inter-Services Intelligence
"Our major mistakes have not been the result of democracy, but of the erosion of democracy made possible by the mass media’s manipulation of public opinion." Robert Cirino
"Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul." Robert G. Ingersoll
"There is no slavery but ignorance. Liberty is the child of intelligence." Robert G. Ingersoll
"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising." - Rubin Frank, former president NBC News
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head." Sally Kempton
"The American people should be made aware of the trend toward monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands." Spiro Agnew
"Every time I criticize what I consider to be excesses or faults in the news business, I am accused of repression, and the leaders of various media professional groups wave the First Amendment as they denounce me. That happens to be my amendment, too. It guarantees my free speech as it does their freedom of the press… There is room for all of us – and for our divergent views – under the First Amendment." Spiro Agnew
"Why is it that millions of children who are pushouts or dropouts amount to business as usual in the public schools, while one family educating a child at home becomes a major threat to universal public education and the survival of democracy?" Stephen Arons
"The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." - Steve Biko
"Government schools can't teach reading, writing, and arithmetic -- why should we trust them to teach morality, respect, and character? If public education does for ethics what it's done for learning, we'll end up with a generation of immoral, disrespectful, and characterless students." Steve Dasbach
"We are caged by our cultural programming. Culture is a mass hallucination, and when you step outside of the mass hallucination you see it for what it's worth." Terrence McKenna
"Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers; for their education is but the mere breaking in of the steer to the yoke; the mere discipline of the hunting dog, which, by dint of severity, is made to forego the strongest impulse of his nature, and instead of devouring his prey, to hasten with it to the feet of his master." Thomas Hodgskin
"In a republican nation whose citizens are to be led by reason and persuasion and not by force, the art of reasoning becomes of first importance." Thomas Jefferson, 1824
"Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Thomas Jefferson
"Just as any moron can destroy a priceless Ming vase, so the shallow and ill-educated people who run our schools can undermine and destroy from within a great civilization that took centuries of dedicated effort to create and maintain." Dr. Thomas Sowell
"It's not until an event, institution, thought, principle, or movement, crosses the media threshold that it becomes real to us." Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives
"[The public school system:] Usually a twelve year sentence of mind control. Crushing creativity, smashing individualism, encouraging collectivism and compromise, destroying the exercise of intellectual inquiry, twisting it instead into meek subservience to authority." Walter Karp
"The news and truth are not the same thing." - Walter Lippmann, American journalist, 1889-1974
"A dying laisser-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the 'owners,' must be subjected to a large degree of social control ... An equitable distribution of income will be sought ... [And] the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual [indoctrination, social engineering] it must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order." Willard Givens, 33 degree Freemason, for 17 years executive secretary of the National Education Association (NEA)
"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." - William Blum - Rogue State, on how governments control their citizens
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." William Colby
"Without an unfettered press, without liberty of speech, all of the outward forms and structures of free institutions are a sham, a pretense -- the sheerest mockery. If the press is not free; if speech is not independent and untrammeled; if the mind is shackled or made impotent through fear, it makes no difference under what form of government you live, you are a subject and not a citizen." William E. Borah
"Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure." William E. Hocking
"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison." William Glasser
"Government will not fail to employ education to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions." William Godwin
"Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility." William Godwin
"I want to make one thing clear. This war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here—in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day—while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones—changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money—for such outrageous "orientation” of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?" William Jenner
"I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state... a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one's mind and often misled it." The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 247-248 - 1959 William L. Shirer (1904-1993) Journalist and Historian
"It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies." Justice William O. Douglas
"Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American (should be) content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.” U.S. Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, 1889
"A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools." William Z Foster, Chairman of the Communist Party USA, Towards a Soviet America (1932)
"A dying laisser-faire must be completely destroyed and all of us, including the 'owners,' must be subjected to a large degree of social control ... An equitable distribution of income will be sought ... [And] the major function of the school is the social orientation of the individual [indoctrination, social engineering] it must seek to give him understanding of the transition to a new social order." Willard Givens, 33 degree Freemason, for 17 years executive secretary of the National Education Association (NEA)
"Remarkably virtually everyone in developed countries desperately tries to believe that they are immune to indoctrination. They think for themselves and readily know the difference between truth and falsity, fantasy and reality, superstition and science, fact and fiction. Technologically sophisticated cultures are conditioned to accept belief systems, behaviors, and values that would have been rejected out of hand by their stone-age predecessors. Primitives would instantly sense the obvious threats to survival and adjustment, or simple nonsense, inherent in many of the treasured beliefs of modern society." Wilson Bryan Key, The Age of Manipulation
"Perhaps the most obvious political effect of controlled news is the advantage it gives powerful people in getting their issues on the political agenda and defining those issues in ways likely to influence their resolution." W. Lance Bennett
"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them." Franklin P. Adams
