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.

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

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

There is arguably something wrong with a method of persuasion that cannot pass the test of publicity.

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.

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.

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.

If you can show that something is to a person's advantage, they have an attractive reason for doing that thing.

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.

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

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

Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.

Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.

Anyone familiar with the marvels of the Worldwide Web can hardly fail to see that we have entered a new era in communications on a scale perhaps comparable to the invention of the Gutenberg press.

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