“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies—the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distraction.”
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)
Help us to complete the source, original and additional information
Aldous Huxley290
English writer 1894–1963Related quotes
Robert M. La Follette Sr. (1855–1925) American politician
"Fooling the People as a Fine Art", La Follette's Magazine (April 1918)
“It should be said that such an art would be neither more false nor more true than classical art.”
Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter
Cubism was born
Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)
1920s, The Press Under a Free Government (1925)
“We can never add more truth to what is true already, nor make that true which is false.”
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757) French writer, satirist and philosopher of enlightenment
p, 125
The History of Oracles, and the Cheats of the Pagan Priests (1688)
Aldous Huxley book Brave New World Revisited
Source: Brave New World Revisited (1958), Chapter 7 (p. 63)
“Happy is the man who knows the true from the false, and refuses to accept less.”
Jami (1414–1492) Persian poet
An argosy of fables, p. 243
about himself, Extracted from Baharīstān-e- Jami