Quotes

What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above.

If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.

So what the media do, in effect, is to take the set of assumptions which express the basic ideas of the propaganda system, whether about the Cold War or the economic system or the “national interest” and so on, and then present a range of debate within that framework-so the debate only enhances the strength of the assumptions, ingraining them in people’s minds as the entire possible spectrum of opinion that there is.

Every powerful state relies on specialists whose task is to show that what the strong do is noble and just and, if the weak suffer, it is their fault.

In the West, these specialists are called “intellectuals” and, with marginal exceptions, they fulfill their task with skill and self-righteousness, however outlandish the claims, in this practice that traces back to the origins of recorded history.

The traditional justification for NATO was defense against Soviet aggression. With the USSR gone, the pretext evaporated. But NATO has been reshaped into a U.S.-run global intervention force, with special concern for control over energy.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

They’re making a movie based off a cartoon from the 80’s which was basically a 30 minute commercial to sell toys? THEY BETTER NOT RUIN IT!!!

if he got a “C” in a course, nobody cared, but if he went to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal’s office -and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what’s valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line… The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told, and to be where you’re supposed to be.

Modern industrial civilization has developed within a system of convenient myths. The driving force has been individual material gain, which is accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. It has long been understood very well that a society based on this principal will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails as long as it is possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can. At this stage in history one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community interests guided by values of solidarity, sympathy and concern for others or alternatively there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy for the special interests that it serves. But the conditions of survival let alone justice require rational social planning in the interests of the community as a whole and by now that means the global community. The question is whether privileged elites should dominate mass communication and should use this power as they tell us they must, namely to impose necessary illusions to manipulate and deceive the “stupid majority” and remove them from the public arena. The question in brief is whether democracy and freedom are values to be preserved or threats to be avoided. In this possibly terminal phase of human existence democracy and freedom are more than values to be treasured, they may well be essential to survival.