Propaganda Art Quotes & Sayings

It is natural if you feel as strongly as most decent people do about racial discrimination to welcome books that give it short shrift; but to assess books on their racial attitude rather than their literary value, and still more to look on books as ammunition in the battle, is to take a further and still more dangerous step from literature-as-morality to literature-as-propaganda - a move toward conditions in which, hitherto, literary art has signally failed to thrive.

("Didacticism in Modern Dress" from Only Connect (2nd ed., 1980). — John Rowe Townsend

All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art. — George Orwell

I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing. — George Bernard Shaw

Man, didn't anybody ever tell you that art is propaganda? It doesn't matter whether you think it should be or it shouldn't be, it just is, and motherfucker, like or not, you're sitting on a funky Magna Carta. — Paul Beatty

The art of those who govern consists above all in the science of employing words. — Gustave Le Bon

In the largest sense, every work of art is protest ... A lullaby is a propaganda song and any three-year-old knows it ... A hymn is a controversial song - sing one in the wrong church: you'll find out ... — Pete Seeger

I'm a Sufi Muslim, I would say. I believe in using the medium to create a good vibration because art is so important to society. Some projects I don't do because I feel that it's going to create a bad vibe. I don't do propaganda films that are anti another religion, anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu. — A.R. Rahman

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. — A.R. Ammons

All art is propaganda. — George Orwell

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference. — David Mamet

I don't think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it. — Keith Haring

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. — John F. Kennedy

The anthology was not a best-seller; art as a weapon seldom is. — Lyle W. Dorsett

Art is not boosterism, it's not propaganda, and it's not spin, but that's not something that art does, and nor has it historically ever done it. — Junot Diaz

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Art should be for sale. The artist should not. — A.E. Samaan

What genuine painters do is to reveal the underlying psychological and spiritual conditions of their relationship to their world; thus in the works of a great painter we have a reflection of the emotional and spiritual condition of human beings in that period of history. If you wish to understand the psychological and spiritual temper of any historical period, you can do no better than to look long and searchingly at its art. For in the art the underlying spiritual meaning of the period is expressed directly in symbols. This is not because artists are didactic or set out to teach or to make propaganda; to the extend that they do, their power of expression is broken; their direct relations to the inarticulate, or, if you will, 'unconscious' levels of the culture is destroyed. They have the power to reveal the underlying meaning of any period precisely because the essence of art is the powerful and alive encounter between the artist and his or her world. (pg 52) — Rollo May

It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs — George Orwell

All great art and literature is propaganda. — George Bernard Shaw

Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Hitler's vast propaganda successes were accomplished with little more than the radio and loudspeaker, and without TV and tape and video recording ... Today the art of mind control is in the process of becoming a science. — Aldous Huxley

Propaganda is the art of persuading others of what you don't believe yourself. — Decimius Magnus Ausonius

The obsession with correct political belief and expression in art is stultifying the genre as it is necessarily exclusive. We are losing our voice in artificial, forced homogeny posing as tolerance. Propaganda-disguised-as-story drives readers away as agenda takes the place of wonder, excitement, character. and conflict. — Scott M. Roberts

Art functioning as propaganda is not art. — Leonard Nimoy

All art is propaganda ... The only difference is the kind of propaganda. Since art is essential for human life, it can't just belong to the few. Art is the universal language, and it belongs to all mankind. All painters have been propagandists or else they have not been painters ... Every artist who has been worth anything in art has been such a propagandist ... Every strong artist has been a propagandist. I want to be a propagandist and I want to be nothing else ... I want to use my art as a weapon. — Diego Rivera

I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success. — Adolf Hitler

The main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the point of view of fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too "innocent," that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda, that kitsch is more pliable to this end. — Clement Greenberg

All truly great art is propaganda ... — Ann Petry

Art is more engaging that propaganda. — Larry Norman

And, consequently, the art of propaganda or public information becomes one of the most powerful forms of directive statesmanship. — John Grierson

In the end, the discipline of verification is what separates journalism from entertainment, propaganda, fiction, or art. — Bill Kovach

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all. — Susan Sontag

I didn't actually know what the protesters in the West really wanted. It was fantastic here, so much freedom, and that was what they were calling musty, middle-class, and fascistic, a bleak period. Bleak was what the GDR was, and it alone had adopted, almost unchanged, Nazi Germany's methods of intimidation and ideas about propaganda and the use of force. — Gerhard Richter

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko ... all believed in the social role of art ... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street ... — John Berger

Propaganda is that branch of the art of lying which consists in nearly deceiving your friends without quite deceiving your enemies. — Francis Cornford

After 1968 the restored communist regime required all Czech rock musicians to sit a written exam in Marxism Leninism — Niall Ferguson

2009: e-mails obtained via the Freedom of Information Act revealed that White House Associate Director of Public Engagement was arranging an NEA-hosted telephone conference with tax-supported artists to encourage the creation of propaganda art to generate public support for President Obama's political agendas. — Alexandra York

Comics can be pernicious, fascist propaganda or anti-authoritarian. The ones that shaped me were particularly anti-authoritarian. — Art Spiegelman

To do what we should in art is bondage. To tell others, with our art, what they should think or feel or do, is propaganda. — David DuChemin

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war. — Walter Benjamin

When people in a democracy are not educated in the art of living
to strengthen their conscience, compassion, and ability to question and think critically
they can be easily manipulated by fear and propaganda. A democracy is only as wise as its citizens, and a democracy of ignorant citizens can be as dangerous as a dictatorship. — Paul K. Chappell

I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad." — Scott Avett

Art is inherently subversive. It's destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda. — Deborah Eisenberg

It's as if we have returned to the era of Protagoras and the sophists, the era when the art of persuasion
for which slogans, commercials, public propaganda meetings, newspapers, cinema, radio are the modern equivalent
took the place of thought, determined the fate of cities and accomplished coups — Simone Weil

Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned. — Rebecca West

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda. — Upton Sinclair

Propaganda rarely makes good art. — Susan Sutherland Isaacs

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't. — Brad Holland

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. — Rita Mae Brown

Advocating through art is known as propaganda. You should look up the name Goebbels. — Glenn Beck

[Propaganda] must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect ... The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. — Adolf Hitler