Bernays Quotes

#1. The process of shaping opinion, attitudes, and perceptions was termed the 'engineering of consent' by one of the founders of the modern public relations industry, Edward Bernays.

Noam Chomsky

#2. The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.

Edward L. Bernays

#3. The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.

Edward L. Bernays

#4. In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.

Edward Bernays

#5. The myth of the detached manipulator and compliant crowd has, since the Twenties, also been abundantly re-echoed by academic students of mass suasion.

Edward L. Bernays

#6. Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.

Edward Bernays

#7. no matter how objectionable the character of a paper may be, it is always a trifle better than the patrons on whom it relies for its support.

Edward L. Bernays

#8. Instead of assaulting sales resistance by direct attack, he is interested in removing sales resistance.

Edward L. Bernays

#9. People want to go where they wanted to be led.

Edward Bernays

#10. Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.

Edward Bernays

#11. In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power.

Edward Bernays

#12. There's a sureness to good writing even when what's being written about doesn't make all that much sense. It's the sureness of the so-called seat of an accomplished horseback rider or a sailor coming about in a strong wind. The words have both muscle and grace, familiarity and surprise.

Anne Bernays

#13. The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.

Edward Bernays

#14. We govern what the public think about.

Edward Bernays

#15. But being dependent, every day of the year and for year after year, upon certain politicians for news, the newspaper reporters are obliged to work in harmony with their news sources.

Edward L. Bernays

#16. Publishers never tell writers anything. They're all crazy and they drive me crazy.

Anne Bernays

#17. Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public's consent to a program or goal.

Edward Bernays

#18. The best place to find things: the public library.

Edward Bernays

#19. As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.

Edward Bernays

#20. If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.

Edward Bernays

#21. It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.

Edward Bernays

#22. Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion.

Edward L. Bernays

#23. I believe that competition in the future will not be only an advertising competition between individual products or between big associations, but that it will in addition be a competition of propaganda.

Edward Bernays

#24. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.

Edward L. Bernays

#25. Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. But there are usually proponents and opponents of every propaganda, both of whom are equally eager to convince the majority.

Edward Bernays

#26. In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.

Edward Bernays

#27. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Edward Bernays

#28. This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas.

Edward Bernays

#29. I can't remember how many times I advised students to stop writing the sunny hours and write from where it hurts: No one wants to read polite. It puts them to sleep.

Anne Bernays

#30. It sounds shameful, but on my best days I write only about three or four hours.

Anne Bernays

#31. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, and emotions.

Edward L. Bernays

#32. The only difference between 'propaganda' and 'education,' really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don't believe in is propaganda.

Edward Bernays

#33. The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed.

Edward Bernays

#34. The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his is a twofold job: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist.

Edward Bernays

#35. When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And "propaganda" got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words so we found the words "public relations".

Edward Bernays

#36. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Edward L. Bernays

#37. Tell a female she's thin and she's yours for life.

Anne Bernays

#38. For the same reason I read the National Geographic, I like to see places I will never visit.

Edward Bernays

#39. Men (people) are rarely aware of the real reasons which motivate their actions.

Edward L. Bernays

#40. The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group.

Edward Bernays

#41. The great enemy of any attempt to change men's habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by intertia.

Edward L. Bernays

#42. The best defense against propaganda: more propaganda.

Edward Bernays

#43. If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.

Edward Bernays

#44. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership. If

Edward L. Bernays