“But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy?”

—  Noam Chomsky

interview on WBAI, January 1992 http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/interviews/9201-propaganda.html.
Quotes 1990s, 1990-1994
Context: The point of public relations slogans like "Support Our Troops" is that they don't mean anything... that's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody is going to be against and I suppose everybody will be for, because nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our policy? And that's the one you're not allowed to talk about.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something, do you support our po…" by Noam Chomsky?
Noam Chomsky photo
Noam Chomsky 334
american linguist, philosopher and activist 1928

Related quotes

Abraham Lincoln photo
Jonah Goldberg photo

“Disenfranchisement is something the government does to you. It's not something you do to yourself. If you can't figure out how to fill in the ovals or punch the chads—and some minority of voters will always botch it—that doesn't mean your right to vote was rescinded. It means that you didn't take your right to vote seriously enough to pay attention to the instructions.”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

( October 22, 2004 http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200410221457.asp) http://web.archive.org/web/20040421/author.nationalreview.com/bio/?q=MjE5NQ==
2000s, 2004

Vladimir Lenin photo

“Tsarism regards the war as a means of diverting attention from the mounting discontent within the country and of suppressing the growing revolutionary movement.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

Nisargadatta Maharaj photo
David Allen photo

“Does something have your attention because you want it to, or because you're avoiding it?”

David Allen (1945) American productivity consultant and author

31 August 2009 https://twitter.com/gtdguy/status/3669905898
Official Twitter profile (@gtdguy) https://twitter.com/gtdguy

Barney Frank photo
Friedrich Hayek photo

“I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

Conversation at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. (9 February 1978); published in A Conversation with Friedrich A. Von Hayek: Science and Socialism (1979)
1960s–1970s
Context: I have arrived at the conviction that the neglect by economists to discuss seriously what is really the crucial problem of our time is due to a certain timidity about soiling their hands by going from purely scientific questions into value questions. This is a belief deliberately maintained by the other side because if they admitted that the issue is not a scientific question, they would have to admit that their science is antiquated and that, in academic circles, it occupies the position of astrology and not one that has any justification for serious consideration in scientific discussion. It seems to me that socialists today can preserve their position in academic economics merely by the pretense that the differences are entirely moral questions about which science cannot decide.

Denis Healey photo

“I am going to negotiate with the IMF on the basis of our existing policies, not changes in policies, and I need your support to do it. (Applause) But when I say "existing policies", I mean things we do not like as well as things we do like. It means sticking to the very painful cuts in public expenditure (shouts from the floor) on which the Government has already decided. It means sticking to a pay policy which enables us, as the TUC resolved a week or two ago, to continue the attack on inflation. (Shout of, "Resign".)”

Denis Healey (1917–2015) British Labour Party politician and Life peer

Speech at the Labour Party Conference (30 September 1976), quoted in Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1976, p. 319. Healey had been forced to abandon plans to attend an international finance ministers' conference in order to speak to the conference because of a run on the pound.
1970s

Paul Newman photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence (1967)
Context: A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Related topics