Quotes

"The first duty of government is to protect the powerless against the powerful."
Code of Hammurabi, 1700 B.C.

"Another weapon I discovered early was the power of the printed word to sway souls to me. The newspaper was soon my gun, my flag- a thing with a soul that could mirror my own." -- Adolf Hitler

"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play." -- Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister.

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger." -- Hermann Goering, Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) commander, at the Nuremberg Trials after World War II.

"The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed, for the vast masses of the nation are in the depths of their hearts more easily deceived than they are consciously and intentionally bad. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders them a more easy prey to a big lie than a small one, for they themselves often tell little lies but would be ashamed to tell a big one." "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." -- From Benito Mussolini, contributing to the "London Sunday Express," December 8, 1935.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it ..." -- General Douglas MacArthur,
1957.

"How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don't
think." -- Adolf Hitler.