“A false ideal of democracy can lead only to disillusionment and to meddlesome tyranny. The public must be put in its place, so that each of us [responsible men] may live free of the trampling and roar of the bewildered herd.”
-The Phantom Public, 1925
“Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by the intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses. Is this government by propaganda? Call it, if you prefer, government by education.”
-Propaganda, 1928
“Propaganda attains eminence as the one means of mass mobilization which is cheaper than violence, bribery or other possible control techniques.”
-Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, 1937
“Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The Senate, therefore, ought to be this body.”
-Federal Convention, June 26, 1787
“We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world benefaction…
We should cease to talk about vague — and for the Far East — unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
-Memo PPS23, February 24, 1948
“In the process of division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those how live by labour, that is, of the great body of people….The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
But in every improved and civilized society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people must necessarily fall, unless government take some pains to prevent it.”
-“The Wealth of Nations“, Book V, Chapter 1, Article II
“Our primary objective is to establish conditions which will bring home to the Cuban people the cost of Castro’s policies and of his Soviet orientation. … If the Cuban people are hungry, they will throw Castro out.”
-White House Memo, 1960
“Castro has provided … Latin America and with a highly exploitable example of revolutionary achievement and successful defiance of the United States.”
-CIA Memo, 1961
“It is obvious enough that the United States crusade against Communism is a campaign against development. By means of it the American people have been lead to acquiesce in the maintenance of a huge war machine and its use by the threat or actual force to try to suppress every popular movement that aims to overthrow ancient or modern tyranny and begin to find a way to overcome poverty and establish national self-respect.”
-“Contrasts in Economic Development: China and India“, in Neal Doyle Houghton, ed., Struggle Against History, U.S. Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolution, 1968
“You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968, you can’t say “nigger.” That hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like “forced busing,” “states’ rights” and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all of these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and the byproduct of them is: Blacks get hurt worse than whites… Because, obviously, sitting around saying we want to cut taxes, we want to cut this, and we want — is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “nigger, nigger,” you know.”
-RNC Chairman Lee Atwater, 1981
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.“
-John Ehrlichman interview with Harper’s Magazine, 1994
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