62 Quotes by Edward L. Bernays

People want to go where they wanted to be led.

Bernays’s tone is managerial, not millenarian, nor does he promise that his methodology will turn this world into a modern paradise. His vision seems quite modest. The world informed by “public relations” will be but “a smoothly functioning society,” where all of us are guided imperceptibly throughout our lives by a benign elite of rational manipulators.

It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad. “They govern us,” the author writes, “by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.

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.

Man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress.

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”.

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.

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.

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