Randal Marlin Quotes

27 Sourced Quotes

We live in a time when complex ethical questions are easily subordinated to the demands of efficiency, profit maximization, and maintenance or furthering of political power.

Randal Marlin
If you can show that something is to a person's advantage, they have an attractive reason for doing that thing.

Randal Marlin
If war is glorified, it tends to eclipse the policies it is meant to serve.

Randal Marlin
The liar wants to be believed, but lying undermines the foundation for credibility.

Randal Marlin
Anyone familiar with the marvels of the Worldwide Web can hardly fail to see that we have entered a new era in communications on a scale perhaps comparable to the invention of the Gutenberg press.

Randal Marlin
Any restrictions to freedom of expression will always open the door to possible others, because analogical reasoning can mount arguments showing why this or that class of objects is closely similar to those for which exceptions have been made.

Randal Marlin
When you give false information you tend to restrict the freedom of choice to others.

Randal Marlin
Small town people assume you are a friend if you simply remember their names.

Randal Marlin
Down to the present day the luminous image of democracy has often served as a pretext for the most undemocratic actions.

Randal Marlin
Exposure as a propagandist is fatal to the would-be persuader.

Randal Marlin
Propaganda analysis can contribute to world peace by exposing those techniques that lead to armed conflict by creating misapprehension of reality.

Randal Marlin
Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.

Randal Marlin
There are many special interests skilful at manipulating circumstances and communications in such a way as to benefit their own ends and not necessarily the public good.

Randal Marlin
In a general way, a major goal of the propagandist is to seek some kind of authoritative backing for the belief he or she is propagating.

Randal Marlin
To avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, an alert citizenry today should take the trouble to learn how easy it can be for a powerful minority to manipulate information to win the support-or the indifference-of the majority towards an action.

Randal Marlin
Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.

Randal Marlin
The special harm attaching to prior restraint is that the government can keep materials from reaching the public, so there can be no accountability, no judgment by the people that the power to suppress was wrongly exercised.

Randal Marlin
There are many other ways in which language can be used to manipulate an audience. one obvious way is to simply lie.

Randal Marlin
Party politics in modern democratic society means pandering to a wide variety of different groups and sympathizing with their often quite base motives, such as revenge, power, booty, and spoils, to maintain the necessary level of support.

Randal Marlin
Once we recognize the power of propaganda, we need to ask whether its exercise is consistent with those democratic ideals to which lip-service is commonly accorded.

Randal Marlin
It is true that advertising often gives information and is valuable for doing so, but some forms of advertising give precious little information, and even that little is wrong.

Randal Marlin
The specific media my change, but the principles of human nature have remained fairly constant over the millenia.

Randal Marlin
When we look for propaganda, we have the obvious job of asking what messages are being propagated.

Randal Marlin
In modern times sound policy-making must often come to grips with numbers.

Randal Marlin
The best goal for propaganda analysis is to develop such an understanding of the phenomenon that it will no longer be profitable for people to engage in it.

Randal Marlin