Quotessence
Home / Topics / Propagandists Quotes

Propagandists Quotes

Browse 8 quotes about Propagandists.

Propagandists Quotes

“It follows that the one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to run the risk of turning them into monsters, whom we can denounce for our (frequently political) motives—an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians (p. 5).”

HistoryMemoryThe PastCensureContextHistoriansPropagandistsMoralists
Book:Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence
Create image

“The assumptions that propagandists are rational, in the sense that they follow their own propaganda theories in their choice of communications, and that the meanings of propagandists' communications may differ for different people reoriented the FCC* analysts from a concept of "content as shared" (Berelson would later say "manifest") to conditions that could explain the motivations of particular communicators and the interests they might serve. The notion of "preparatory propaganda" became an especially useful key for the analysts in their effort to infer the intents of broadcasts with political content. In order to ensure popular support for planned military actions, the Axis leaders had to inform; emotionally arouse, and otherwise prepare their countrymen and women to accept those actions; the FCC analysts discovered that they could learn a great deal about the enemy's intended actions by recognizing such preparatory efforts in the domestic press and broadcasts. They were able to predict several major military and political campaigns and to assess Nazi elites' perceptions of their situation, political changes within the Nazi governing group, and shifts in relations among Axis countries. Among the more outstanding predictions that British analysts were able to make was the date of deployment of German V weapons against Great Britain. The analysts monitored the speeches delivered by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels and inferred from the content of those speeches what had interfered with the weapons' production and when. They then used this information to predict the launch date of the weapons, and their prediction was accurate within a few weeks. *FCC - Federal Communications Commission”

CommunicationPropagandaAnalysisPropagandists
Book:Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology
Create image

“Anti-Semitism was, of course, the Nazis' cleverest -- because most effective -- psychological stroke. Moreover, the leaders and forerunners of Nazism really believed in it -- for we must not imagine that any propaganda line will ever make headway unless its early spokesmen are themselves convinced of its truth. All political extremists mean what they say and shout. All of them, on both right and left, will carry out what they have promised in their wildest proclamations. For if they ranted only to win votes, or out of pure calculation, they would never be able to incite the masses to fanaticism. That is a truism we have learned through many painful lessons.”

FanaticismAnti SemitismNazi GermanyNazisPropagandists
Book:A Part of Myself
Create image