Randal Marlin Quotes

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

Any restrictions to freedom of expression will always open the door to possible others, because analogical reasoning can mount arguments showing why this or that class of objects is closely similar to those for which exceptions have been made.

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.

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.

It is true that advertising often gives information and is valuable for doing so, but some forms of advertising give precious little information, and even that little is wrong.

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

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.

Once we recognize the power of propaganda, we need to ask whether its exercise is consistent with those democratic ideals to which lip-service is commonly accorded.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

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.

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.

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.

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