Today’s Quote-to-Quote: Maintaining Danger for Profit

“If the people are not convinced [that America is in serious danger] it would be impossible for Congress to vote the vast sums now being spent to avert danger. With the support of public opinion, as marshaled by the press, we are off to a good start. It is our job — yours and mine — to keep our people convinced that the only way to keep disaster away from our shores is to build up America’s might.”
— Charles Wilson, Chairman of the Board of major defense contractor General Electric and Truman appointee to head the Office of Defense Mobilization, in a speech to the Newspaper Publishers Association, 1950.

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.”
— Dresden James

“Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector.”
— Michael Lerner

“The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same.”
— Marie Beyle