Connexions Quotations

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Ideology and Propaganda
Quotes


All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
- George Orwell

Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone else should be bullied into thinking likewise.
- George Orwell

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
- George Orwell

Far from according respect, the multiculturalist censor treats people not as autonomous beings but as incapable victims needing special protection. The result is an auction of victimhood as every group attempts to outbid all others as the one feeling most offended.
- Kenan Malik

I am not a ‘Marxist’.
- Karl Marx

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
- Karl Marx   The German Ideology

“I’ve noticed,” said Mr. Keuner, “that a lot of people are put off by our teaching because we know the answer to everything. Couldn’t we, in the interests of propaganda, draw up a list of questions which appear to us quite unresolved?”
- Bertolt Brecht   Anecdotes of Mr. Keuner

Neoliberal house of horrors
If Hitchcock had made a film about neoliberal economics, the Chicago School of Economics would be the Bates Motel, Milton Friedman would be the demented proprietor, and Friedrich Hayek would be the dead mother in the attic.
- Ulli Diemer

In every scheme that worsens the position of the poor, it is the poor who are invoked as beneficiaries.
- Vandana Shiva

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview – nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.
- Stephen Jay Gould

On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects..
- Karl Marx
  Capital, Volume I, Chapter 16

Private enterprise ideology falls on us, day and night, like acid rain.
- Herschel Hardin

Until the rise of American advertising, it never occurred to anyone anywhere in the world that the teenager was a captive in a hostile world of adults.
- Gore Vidal

We are being occupied by the marketeers as the French and Norwegians were occupied by the Germans. We have, as they did, puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupiers.... One of the things that anyone who has lived under a military occupation will tell you is that the resistors often refused to speak the language of the occupier.... We too should refuse to speak the language of the occupier i.e. the language of the market. It’s a language that reflects, as all languages do, the moral values of those who speak. For the marketeers, there are only economic values – whatever cannot be bought and sold, is not of value. One path of resistance is to refuse to communicate in the language of the occupier. So don’t talk about ‘stakeholders’ and ‘users’, ‘healthcare providers’ or ‘consumers of education’. For us, they are our ‘teachers’ and ‘students’, ‘doctors’ and ‘nurses’, ‘patients’ and ‘communities’; they are our ‘families’ and ‘friends’.
- Ursula Franklin

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To learn more about Ideology and Propaganda, explore the Connexions Subject Index Ideology page and the Propaganda page.