John F. Kennedy Quotes

The Castro regime is a thorn in the flesh, but it is not a dagger in the heart.... I have no evidence that the Cuban people are able and willing at this time to assist any invasion from the outside.

My parents didn't agree with what was going on, you know, with the communists coming in, Fidel Castro. I didn't see the reason why I needed to go back there and be a part of that exhibition.

This is probably my last free statement through our news media, where the radio and television are already under the heel of the ruling political party of Prime Minister Robert Mugabe. One would have thought radio and television were enough as propaganda tools.

The U. S. press has become a major source of unauthorized intelligence information. Classified information disclosed in the press is the equivalent of information obtained by enemy espionage.

Maybe if you had printed more about the [Bay of Pigs] operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.

The White House expansion to control the entire corpus of the News was the direct result of television.

No less a philosopher than Chief Justice Burger was outraged by Ellsberg's publication of classified documents. They belonged to the Government, Burger reasoned, and Ellsberg had no more right to give them to the people than he would have to filch another man's property off a taxicab seat. The Government, of course, commonly leaks classified documents when it deems publication convenient to manipulate public opinion to its advantage. Only the Government, it seems, has a legal right to manipulate opinion with hot documents.

The hand that rules the press, the radio, the screen, and the far spread magazine, rules the country.

…as the Cuban exiles intensify their activities aimed at overthrowing Castro, the more difficult it will become to conceal the U.S. hand..

This story going around about the CIA … sending in folks to get Castro, It’s incredible. They have a man that was involved that was brought into the CIA, with a number of others, and instructed by the CIA and the Attorney General [then Robert F. Kennedy] to assassinate Castro after the Bay of Pigs.

The left takes credit for being the political aisle promoting human rights and fighting oppression, but in the case of Cuba, its adherents promoted oppression and human rights abuses for decades by glorifying the Castro regime and its savage enforcer, Che Guevara.

Moscow had this incredible, intense atmosphere of intrigue and darkness and secrecy.

I lived in Cuba - I was there for one year in the 1950s. We built the famous nightclub, which is still there, Tropicana, and a restaurant, Montecatini, that I opened is still there. I was there when the U.S. ambassador said everyone must leave because Castro was arriving the next morning.

The press is our chief ideological weapon.

One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of propaganda.

Intermediary liability enables the Chinese authorities to minimize the number of people they need to put in jail in order to stay in power and to maximize their control over what the Chinese people know and don't know.

States which used to communicate directly to their citizens now do so through the media, where their messages are reshaped by the logics of news values and commentary.

One of the achievements of which I am most proud was the codification, the writing into U.S. law, of the U.S. embargo on the Castro dictatorship.

One of the best ways of enslaving a people is to keep them from education... The second way of enslaving a people is to suppress the sources of information, not only by burning books but by controlling all the other ways in which ideas are transmitted.

The press ... is but the servant of human intellect and its ministry is for good or evil, according to the character of those who direct it. The press is a mill that grinds all that is put into its hopper. Fill the hopper with poisoned grain and it will grind it to meal, but there is death in the bread.

The media can make or break an administration.

To say that the newspaper press represents public opinion is to administer insult to intelligent men. It is the property of speculators, political leaders, large contractors and railway directors.

Newspapers at that time did not necessarily try to flatter those in power. Rather, they wrote to please readers. I may sound evasive. but there certainly existed some kind of mechanism that aggravated the situation through subtle interactions between newspapers and the public. Readers were waiting for articles reporting the exploits of the victorious Imperial Forces, Newspapers indulged themselves in a competition to appear more patriotic and to see who could print the most articles urging and exalting victory. Newspaper companies cooperated through the dispatch of entertainers, calls for patriotic songs, campaigns for contributions to build more airplanes, and various other ways. The heavy responsibility that the newspapers bear is second only to that of the government.

If the people are not convinced that the Free World is in mortal danger it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshaled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our Job --- yours and mine --- to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America's might.

The primary purpose of the media is to mobilize support for the controlling interests.