The mass media have a great power over the population, and the politics know that, and use them more than anyone. They play a key role for the development of public opinion and the formation of ideologies.
See this list of 50 quotes that have become controversial, making story.
The order is random.
1.
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
2.
The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.
Ernest Hemingway
3.
When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.
Anais Nin
4.
Feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
Pat Robertson
5.
All ideologies are idiotic, whether religious or political, for it is conceptual thinking, the conceptual word, which has so unfortunately divided man.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
6.
If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell.
Thomas Merton
7.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
Aldous Huxley
8.
There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.
Noam Chomsky
9.
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman
10.
The political machine triumphs because it is a united minority acting against a divided majority.
Will Durant
11.
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
Mao Zedong
12.
Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world’s ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all.
John W. Gardner
13.
No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses.
Vladimir Lenin
14.
Imagine a political system so radical as to promise to move more of the poorest 20% of the population into the richest 20% than remain in the poorest bracket within the decade? You don’t need to imagine it. It’s called the United States of America.
Thomas Sowell
15.
It’s plain hokum. If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em. It’s an old political trick. But this time it won’t work.
Harry S. Truman
16.
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.
Karl Marx
17.
Believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That’s where I’m very optimistic.
Ron Paul
18.
It is economic power that determines political power, and governments become the political functionaries of economic power.
Jose Saramago
19.
The State is the altar of political freedom and, like the religious altar, it is maintained for the purpose of human sacrifice.
Emma Goldman
20.
Reports that say something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
Donald Rumsfeld
21.
Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
Henry A. Wallace
22.
Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people and the world.
Barry Goldwater
23.
Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.
Benito Mussolini
24.
The political lesson of Watergate is this: Never again must America allow an arrogant, elite guard of political adolescents to by-pass the regular party organization and dictate the terms of a national election.
Gerald R. Ford
25.
For Russia, there is not and there may not be another political option but democracy. However, Russian democracy is… not at all the realization of standards imposed on us from outside.
Vladimir Putin
26.
Power is the great aphrodisiac.
Henry A. Kissinger
27.
The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and the means can never be considered in isolation form their purposes.
Carl von Clausewitz
28.
In our political system, money is power. And that means a few can have a lot more power than the rest. That’s bad news for everyone else – and for our democracy itself.
Al Franken
29.
People might not protest for overtly political or social causes, but when they can’t feed themselves and their family, they will take to the streets.
Marcus Samuelsson
30.
Many Jews are not Zionists and many non-Jews are. Zionism is a political movement, not a race. To say Zionism is the Jewish people is like saying the Democratic Party is the American people. Jewish people who oppose Zionism, however, have been given a very hard time.
David Icke
31.
Quite frankly, I think political correctness is the worst form of censorship. You’re not allowed to speak your mind unless you’re black, or unless you’re a terrorist, or unless you’re an Arab or a minority people. Then you can say what you like. But if you are like a lot of us you are not supposed to say certain things.
Wilbur Smith
32.
Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a worldwide depression all by myself.
Herbert Hoover
33.
The workers of the nation were tired of waiting for corporate industry to right their economic wrongs, to alleviate their social agony and to grant them their political rights. Despairing of fair treatment, they resolved to do something for themselves.
John L. Lewis
34.
A media system wants ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity
Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels
35.
Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.
Gary Hamel
36.
Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.
Henry Kissinger
37.
Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason.
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
38.
Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.
W.C. Fields
39.
Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev
40.
I believe in working together to solve the problems we’ve got. And we need to get rid of the venom in the political atmosphere in D.C. It’s a poisonous atmosphere.
Scott McClellan
41.
Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.
Andrea Dworkin
42.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
Corazon Aquino
43.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely!
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
44.
Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left.
John Podhoretz
45.
It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man’s interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.
Anthony Trollope
46.
Dialogue is the basis of Indian culture, and we don’t want to make any enemies. Political and ideological adversaries, perhaps, but not enemies.
Evo Morales
47.
Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.
Alan Greenspan
48.
No politician should ever let himself be photographed in a bathing suit.
Adolf Hitler
49.
[The American President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues. … The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
Harry S. Truman
50.
It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.
Henry Kissinger
Parliamentary democracy itself is based on a conceptualisation of the relationship between ruler and ruled that is dead. In that conceptualisation, we the people accept being ruled by a tiny elite as long as we get to choose which tiny elite is doing the ruling. The problem is that the populations of the advanced economies increasingly don’t like the idea of being ruled by a tiny elite whether they have chosen them or not.