Political manipulation
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt • Hannah Arendt Quote
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” Goebbels allegedly said; this was in fact the distillation of a cynical truth Hitler had commented on in a chapter on reasons for Germany’s surrender at the end of the First World War in the first volume of Mein Kampf. But big lies require big
... See moreTimothy W. Ryback • Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power
Hannah Arendt powerfully explained “the constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and... See more
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” she wrote, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism
"Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear." — Hannah Arendt