Secrets, Lies and Democracy Quotes

“If people are sufficiently intimidated, if the popular organizations are sufficiently destroyed, if the people have had it beaten into their heads that either they accept the rule of those with the guns or else they live and die in unrelieved misery, than your elections will all come out the way you want. And everybody will cheer.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“By the way, that propaganda system includes not just how issues are framed in news stories but also how they're presented in entertainment programming— that huge area of the media that's simply devoted to diverting people and making them more stupid and passive.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“As I mentioned earlier, they don't want decision-makers and participants; they want a passive, obedient population of consumers and political spectators—a community of people who are so atomized and isolated that they can't put together their limited resources and become an independent, powerful force that will chip away at concentrated power.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“I agree with Adam Smith on this-we'd like to see a tendency toward equality. Not just equality of opportunity, but actual equality— the ability, at every stage of one's existence, to access information and make decisions on the basis of it.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“That's a dramatic example of the efficiency with which business controls US ideology, of how effective its propaganda and indoctrination have been in depriving people of any awareness of their own rights and history.
You have to wait for poor Latino and Chinese workers to celebrate an international holiday of solidarity with American workers.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“The causes are the increasing polarization of the society that's been going on for the past twenty-five years, and the marginalization of large sectors of the population. Since they're superfluous for wealth production (meaning profit production), and since the basic ideology is that a person's human rights depend on what they can get for themselves in the market system, they have no human value.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“For example, one of the effects of the so-called free trade agreement with Canada was to stimulate a big flow of jobs from Canada to the southeast US, because that's an essentially nonunion area. Wages are lower; you don't have to worry about benefits; workers can barely organize. So that's an attack against Canadian workers.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

“This argument isn't quite presented step-by-step like that in the article-I've collapsed it. It's very clever propaganda, well designed, well crafted, with plenty of thought behind it. Its goal is to make people as stupid, ignorant, passive and obedient as possible, while at the same time making them feel that they're somehow moving towards higher forms of participation.”
― Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy