Alfred Jarry Quotes

Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.

The public doesn't care about figures.

I hear what people say, I read all the reviews, all the blogs, and I am always curious to hear it, because you can't always listen to the good press, you have to hear the bad press, too.

Almost half of the Turkish population believes it is not legitimate to criticize the government. Interestingly, this correlates with the number of supporters of Erdogan's government.

I think the most important thing for the public and the press is to just listen to what Donald Trump says and follow up and ask questions about what appear to be either contradictory or uninformed or outright wacky ideas.

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

Bad reviews I've gotten never diminished the number of people in my audience; good reviews have never added to the number of people in my audience; be your own critic.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people. He’s about double the numbers now. Can you imagine if McCain had won and did precisely what Obama has done, with every speech and every political maneuver overseas? There’d be riots in the streets about the people we’re killing. And yet because it’s Obama, and he’s better looking and better at reading the teleprompter, we let him get away with it.

Englishmen are babes in philosophy and so prefer faction-fighting to the labour of its unfamiliar thought.

For I must not measure the speech of a statesman to his people by the impression which it leaves in a university professor, but by the effect it exerts on the people. And this alone gives the standard for the speaker's genius.

The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy.

Even in this case, whatever it is, it's about [Barack] Obama. "How did Obama do at the memorial? Did Obama come off well? Will Obama's poll numbers go up? Did he really reach people?" The hell that there are 53 people dead. Nobody cares about them, like nobody cared about the four dead in Benghazi. All the media cared about, how did Obama do?

America is the only country where a significant proportion of the population believes that professional wrestling is real but the moon landing was faked.

Statistics have proven that the surest way to get anything out of the public mind and never hear of it again is to have a Senate committee appointed to look into it.

. . .the larger the crowd, the more probable that that which it praises is folly, and the more improbable that it is truth; and the most improbable of all that it is any eternal truth.

Unless you're willing to fight and refight the same battles until you go blue in the face, drive the people you work with nuts going over every detail to make certain you've got it right, and then take hit after unfair hit accusing you of bias, there's no use even trying. You have to love it, and I do. You just hope it strikes a spark somewhere in the critical mass of public opinion and helps some people to resist further the seductions of political and corporate advertising.

We are praised or blamed, as the one or the other may be expedient, for displaying to advantage our power of discernment.

The presumption that any current opinion is not wholly false, gains in strength according to the number of its adherents.

Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession - their ignorance.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

Polls are the corporate media's standardized tests to determine how well we have learned what it has taught us.

The idea of what the public will think prevents the public from ever thinking at all, and acts as a spell on the exercise of private judgment.

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw.

We have this sacred cow in our society that what the majority of people want is right—but is it? Our populace can't really be informed, not the majority of them—most people vote the way they have been manipulated and by the way they have responded to that manipulation—they are working out their own patterns of wishful thinking on the social environment in which they live.

The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.