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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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