"All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it... Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets 
of people are human."

Gen. Douglas MacArthur

"One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the 
screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The 
P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade 
whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that 
kind of thing to the journalists in the rear. The people who wrote pamphlets against us 
and vilified us in the newspapers all remained safe at home, or at worst in the newspaper 
offices of Valencia, hundreds of miles from the bullets and the mud. And apart from the 
libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, 
the vilification of the enemy - all these were done, as usual, by people who were not 
fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight... Perhaps 
when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo 
with a bullet-hole in him."

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

"Almost all propaganda is designed to create fear. Heads of governments and their 
officials know that a frightened people are easier to govern, will forfeit rights it would 
otherwise defend, are less likely to demand a better life, and will agree to millions and 
millions being spent on 'defense'."

J.B. Priestly

"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."