A Quote by Revilo P. Oliver

It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression.

Revilo P. Oliver

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Animals Automatically Basis Be Encouraged Between Certain Choice Circus Command Controlled Course Decisions Democratic Encouraged Expression Facial Facial Expression Hair Ideas Imagine Imagine That Implants Important Important Decisions Kind Leaving Makes Masses Must Only Oratory Particular Populace Preference Propaganda Respond States Style Suitable Therefore Thus Trained Truism Voters Voting Which Words

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Revilo P. Oliver
July 7, 1908 - August 20, 1994

To create one must be able to respond. Creativity is the ability to respond to all that goes on around us, to choose from the hundreds of possibilities of though, feeling, action, and reaction and to put these together in a unique response, expression or message that carries moment, passion and meaning. In this sense, loss of our creative milieu means finding ourselves limited to only one choice, divested of, suppressing, or cendoring feelings and thoughts, not acting, not saying, doing, or being.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes

The states have the authority to change this voting system for president, right now, in fact, if they wanted, on an emergency basis, they could adopt a ranked-choice system, which simply allows you to go to the poll, and rather than rolling your dice and deciding whether to vote your values or your fears, you get to rank your choices, knowing that if your first choice loses your vote is automatically assigned to your second choice. It's kind of a no-brainer system. It works very well.

Jill Stein

If Clinton somehow pulls out a win in both states, then she has an excellent argument to make to the superdelegates: Voters still respond to fear. Obama's campaign has been based on the implicit argument that voters no longer respond to fear. If Clinton wins both states, that probably proves Obama wrong on that point.

Cynthia Tucker

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

Jacques Barzun

Given that some social processes must convey inherent constraints, the choice is among various mixtures of persuasion, force, and cultural inducement. The less of one, the more of the others. The degree of freedom that is possible is therefore tied to the extent to which people respond to persuasion or inducement.

Thomas Sowell

To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.

Adolf Hitler

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception.

Stan Brakhage

In the course of the history of the earth innumerable events have occurred one after another, causing changes of states, all with certain lasting consequences. This is the basis of our developmental law, which, in a nutshell, claims that the diversity of phenomena is a necessary consequence of the accumulation of the results of all individual occurrences happening one after another... The current state of the earth, thus, constitutes the as yet most diverse final result, which of course represents not a real but only a momentary end-point.

Bernhard von Cotta

The painter must enclose himself within his work; he must respond not with words, but with paintings.

Paul Cezanne

This is community land that belongs to particular clans, and therefore, it must go back and its administration and the determination as to what to do, must rest in the hand of the communities. That is why you have these committees, among whose members, of course, they will be traditional leaders. You will have these collectives, which must then deal with the land, the issue of communal rights.

Thabo Mbeki

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr

[The masses] ... must turn their hopes toward a miracle. In the depths of their despair reason cannot be believed, truth must be false, and lies must be truth. "Higher bread prices," "lower bread prices," "unchanged bread prices" have all failed. The only hope lies in a kind of bread price which is none of these, which nobody has ever seen before, and which belies the evidence of one's reason.

Peter Drucker

The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince... the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.

Adolf Hitler

But there are no institutions on earth which enable each separate person to have a hand in the exercise of Power, for Power is command, and everyone cannot command. Sovereignty of the people is, therefore, nothing but a fiction, and one which must in the long run prove destructive of individual liberties.

Bertrand de Jouvenel

Voting, the be all and end all of modern democratic politicians, has become a farce, if indeed it was ever anything else. By voting, the people decide only which of the oligarchs preselected for them as viable candidates will wield the whip used to flog them and will command the legion of willing accomplices and anointed lickspittles who perpetrate the countless violations of the people's natural rights. Meanwhile, the masters soothe the masses by assuring them night and day that they - the plundered and bullied multitudes who compose the electorate - are themselves the government.

Robert Higgs

It is one of the saddest spectacles of our time to see a great democratic movement support a policy which must lead to the destruction of democracy and which meanwhile can benefit only a minority of the masses who support it. Yet it is this support from the Left of the tendencies toward monopoly which make them so irresistible and the prospects of the future so dark.

Friedrich August von Hayek

A Quote by Revilo P. Oliver

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