• We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues to that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions.
• The steam engine, the multiple press, and the public school, that trio of the industrial revolution, have taken the power away from kings and given it to the people. The people actually gained power that the king lost. Economic power tends to draw after its political power, and the history of the industrial revolution shows how that power passed from the king and the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, the hedonist middle class.
• The Professional Propagandist Modern propaganda is a consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.
• In our present social organisation, approval of the public is essential to any large undertaking. Hence a laudable movement may be lost unless it impresses itself on the public mind. Charity, as well as business, and politics and literature, for that matter, have had to adopt propaganda, for the public must be regimented into giving money just as it must be regimented into tuberculosis prophylaxis.
• This new technique may fairly be called ‘the new propaganda’. It takes account not merely of the individual, nor even of the mass mind alone, but also and especially of the anatomy of society, with its interlocking group formations and loyalties. It sees the individual not only as a cell in the social organism but as a cell organised into the social unit. Touch a nerve at a sensitive spot and you get an automatic response from certain specific members of the organism.
• There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. it is not generally realised to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.
• The new profession of public relations has grown up because of the increasing complexity of modern life and the consequent necessity for making the actions of one part of the public understandable to other sectors of the public.
• The group is motivated by impulses and emotions that cannot be explained on the basis of what we know of individual psychology.
• Trotter and Le Bon concluded that the group mind does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind, its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader.
• A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because people unconsciously see it as a symbol of something else, the desire for which people are ashamed to admit to themselves.
• One of the most effective methods is the clever use of the group formation of modern society to spread ideas.
• Business realises that its relationship to the public is not confined to the manufacture and sale of a given product, but includes at the same time the selling of itself and of all those things for which it stands in the public mind.
• A single factory, potentially capable of supplying a whole continent with its particular product cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda, with the vast public to assure itself the continuous demand that alone will make its costly plant profitable. This entails a vastly more complex system of distribution than before. To make customers is the new problem. One must understand not only their own business - the manufacture of a particular product - but also the structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.
• It matters not how much capital you may have, how fair the rates may be, how favourable the conditions of service. if you haven’t behind you a sympathetic public opinion, you are bound to fail.
• Mass advertising has produced new kinds of competition. Competition between rival products in the same line is, of course, as old as economic life itself. In recent years much has been said of the new competition, we have discussed it in a previous chapter, between one group of products and another.
• Inter-commodity competition is the new competition between products used alternatively for the same purpose. Inter-industrial competition is the new competition between apparently unrelated industries which affect each other or between such industries as compete for the consumer’s dollar - and that means practically all industries.
• Amusement, too, is a business - one of the largest in America. It was the amusement business - first the circus and the medicine show, then the theatre - that taught the rudiments of advertising to industry and commerce.
• The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders.
• American business first learned from politics the methods of appealing to the broad public. But it continually improved those methods in the course of its competitive struggle, while politics clung to the old formulas.
• Because a politician knows political strategy, can develop campaign issues, can devise strong planks for platforms and envisage broad policies, it does not follow that he can be given the responsibility of selling ideas to a public as large as that of the United States.