“Propaganda is a soft weapon; hold it in your hands too long, and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way.”
—Jean Anouilh, L’Alouette, 1952

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”
—George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

“When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
—Robert A. Heinlein, If This Goes On, 1940

“Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.”
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
—Noam Chomsky, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 1997

“As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”
—Gore Vidal, Imperial America, 2004

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