Randal Marlin Quotes

To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, an alert citizenry today should take the trouble to learn how easy it can be for a powerful minority to manipulate information to win the support-or the indifference-of the majority towards an action.

Party politics in modern democratic society means pandering to a wide variety of different groups and sympathizing with their often quite base motives, such as revenge, power, booty, and spoils, to maintain the necessary level of support.

The specific media my change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia.

If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.

Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.

Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions.

When you give false information you tend to restrict the freedom of choice to others.

There are many special interests skilful at manipulating circumstances and communications in such a way as to benefit their own ends and not necessarily the public good.

When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.

The best goal for propaganda analysis is to develop such an understanding of the phenomenon that it will no longer be profitable for people to engage in it.

When we consider propaganda as the attempt to shape the thoughts and feelings of others, in ways conforming to the aims of the communicator, we find a vast array of different examples throughout history.

The liar wants to be believed, but lying undermines the foundation for credibility.

There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.

In a general way, a major goal of the propagandist is to seek some kind of authoritative backing for the belief he or she is propagating.

The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.