Thoughts on { The manipulation of public opinion | Henrik Ibsen / Oscar Wilde / Allen Ginsberg / H.G. Wells / G.K. Chesterton / George Orwell / Rudyard Kipling
Peter Blake, Homage to Rauschenberg II, 2011
“Public opinion is an extremely mutable thing”
Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, 1882
“By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps
us in touch with the ignorance of the community.”
Oscar Wilde
“Whoever controls the media, the images, controls the culture.”
Allen Ginsberg
“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.”
Philip K. Dick
“The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.”
Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
“As if there wasn’t a thousand things that were never heard.”
H.G. Wells, The Sleeper Awakes, 1899
“the trend of the time at its best consists entirely of people who will not accommodate themselves to anything. At its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there. And that is becoming more and more the situation…Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.”
G.K. Chesterton, Heretics, 1905
“The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”
George Orwell
“Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?”
Rudyard Kipling, The Light That Failed, 1890
“Vox populi, vox humbug” (The voice of the people, the voice of humbug ^).
William T. Sherman, 1820-1891
“Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden & Civil Disobedience, 1854
^ A humbug is a person or object that behaves in a deceptive or dishonest way, often as a hoax or in jest.
