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.
Aldous Huxley Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Chapter 4 (pp. 35-36)
- work
- Brave New World Revisited (1958)
- year
- 1958
- locator
- pp. 35-36
Cite this record
“In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal lit…” Aldous Huxley. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E267684721. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e267684721
More from Aldous Huxley
[H]istory is — the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.
Facts are ventriloquists' dummies. Sitting on a wise man's knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom; elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.
The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.