James A. Garfield Quotes

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years.

The delusion of the people is necessary to the dominant party. I see the extent to which that delusion has been already carried, and I see there is no length to which it may not be pushed by a party in possession of the revenues and the legal authorities of the United States

In politics where immediate success is attained by saying what people can be made to believe, rather than what is demonstrably true, accent is generally placed on the desirable rather than on the possible.

A magic trick of any sort works because you tell yourself a story about what you see. And politicians use this all the time in their own way by throwing a load of statistics at you when things don't quite follow and then saying, 'So therefore blah,' and you believe that 'blah' thing because of the confusion that's come before.

Slogans which deafened us so that we could not hear the truth.

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

If you can't convince them, confuse them.

Politicians are masters of the art of deception.

I think people involved in politics make good actors. Acting and politics both involve fooling people. People like being fooled by actors. When you get right down to it, they probably like being fooled by politicians even more. A skillful actor will make you think, but a skillful politician will make you never have to think.

The nature of politics is to subtract meaning from language.

Campaigns exaggerate or oversimplify the truth because it’s effective.

All political power is primarily an illusion …. Mirrors and blue smoke …

Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

If people tell an untruth long enough and loud enough, they begin to believe it themselves.

Hypocrisy and rhetorical flimflam are standard in politics …

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all the people some of the time, which is just long enough to be president of the United States.

The oblique paradox of propaganda is that the lie in the throat becomes, by repetition, the truth in the heart.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.

You don't need a digital David Petraeus or a President Bush avatar to distract you from the truth. You don't need to wait decades to have disinformation beamed into your head. You just need a constant stream of misleading information, half truths, and fictions to be promoted, pushed, and peddled until they are accepted as fact.

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Political commercials encourage the deceptive, the destructive and the degrading.