“Technique shapes an aristocratic society, which in turn implies aristocratic government. Democracy in such a society can only be a mere appearance. Even now, we see in propaganda the premises of such a state of affairs. When it comes to state propaganda, there is no longer any question of democracy.”

Chap.II: The Rise Of The Historic Level
The Revolt of the Masses (1929)

interview on WBAI, January 1992 http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199201--.htm.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994
Variant: Propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
Source: Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
Context: Harold Laswell … explained a couple of years after this in the early 1930s that we should not succumb to what he called democratic dogmatisms about men being the best judges of their own interests.… In what's nowadays called a totalitarian state, military state or something, it's easy. You just hold a bludgeon over their heads, but as societies become more free and democratic you lose that capacity and therefore you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear—propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state….
Context: Walter Lippmann … described what he called “the manufacture of consent” as “a revolution” in “the practice of democracy”... And he said this was useful and necessary because “the common interests” - the general concerns of all people - “elude” the public. The public just isn't up to dealing with them. And they have to be the domain of what he called a "specialized class" … [Reinhold Niebuhr]'s view was that rationality belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average man, he follows not reason, but faith. And this naive faith requires necessary illusion, and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth-maker to keep the ordinary person on course. It's not the case, as the naive might think, that indoctrination is inconsistent with democracy. Rather, as this whole line of thinkers observes, it is the essence of democracy. The point is that in a military state or a feudal state or what we would now call a totalitarian state, it doesn't much matter because you've got a bludgeon over their heads and you can control what they do. But when the state loses the bludgeon, when you can't control people by force, and when the voice of the people can be heard, you have this problem—it may make people so curious and so arrogant that they don't have the humility to submit to a civil rule [Clement Walker, 1661], and therefore you have to control what people think. And the standard way to do this is to resort to what in more honest days used to be called propaganda, manufacture of consent, creation of necessary illusion. Various ways of either marginalizing the public or reducing them to apathy in some fashion.

Source: The Human Form: Sculpture, Prints, and Drawings, 1977, p. 12.

Constitutional Choices (1985), The Nature of the Enterprise, The Futile Search for Legitimacy

A Warning From Europe: The Worst is Yet to Come https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/poland-polarization/568324/ (October 2018), The Atlantic.

Source: The Political Thought of Abdullah Ocalan (2017), Democratic Confederalism, p. 39

Tusnádfürdő speech http://www.kormany.hu/en/the-prime-minister/the-prime-minister-s-speeches/prime-minister-viktor-orban-s-speech-at-the-25th-balvanyos-summer-free-university-and-student-camp, 26 July 2014

Influence of Domestic Slavery on Government
1790s

In a communication with Pandit Nehru on the issue of large scale influx of refugees after partition from :w:East Bengal in January 1948.[Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, http://books.google.com/books?id=FjQ0iWSq2R0C&pg=PA130, 2010, Cambridge University Press, 978-1-139-46830-5, 130–31]
The Spoils of Partition