Eric Hoffer Quotes

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing that counts.

It takes an institution to help propagandize an idea.

If you tell people something often enough, they will believe it.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

Propaganda is not French, it is not civilized to want other people to believe what you believe because the essence of being civilized is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess yourself as you are, you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your business.

We are all missionaries (propagandists of our views). Each of us disapproves of the other missionaries.

Those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. […] We're used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.

Propaganda invariably serves the long-term interests of some elite.

One person with a belief is equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

You can make an audience see nearly anything, if you yourself believe in it.

I'm a bit of a propagandist.

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

There is a holy mistaken zeal in politics as religion. By persuading others, we convince ourselves.

One man with beliefs is equal to a thousand with only interests.

Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what one does not believe oneself.

Manipulation is persuading people to make up their minds while withholding some of the facts from them.

Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve.

Socialists have infiltrated our schools, our law courts, our government, our MEDIA OF COMMUNICATIONS. ... the Socialist movement is made up of a relatively small number of people who have developed the TECHNIQUE OF INFLUENCING large masses of people to a VERY HIGH DEGREE

People usually believe anything that they are told early and often.

I am sick of deconstructing their propaganda, because it's pretty much the same as it's always been. It's just repeating something over and over again until we believe it and we hope that you believe it.

There is nothing that you may not get people to believe in if you will only tell it them loud enough and often enough, till the welkin rings with it.

We need to be aware of all different forms of brainwashing and radicalization.

Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brainwashing.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes

I'm manipulating the audience. I'm making sure people sympathize.