Kyle Clewett

“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers.”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“We loved once, and we loved badly. We loved again, and again we loved badly. We did it a third time, and we were no longer living in a world free of experience. We saw that love did not make us tender, wise, or compassionate. Under its influence we gave up neither our fears nor our angers. Within ourselves we remained unchanged. The development was an astonishment: not at all what had been expected. The atmosphere became charged with revelation, and it altered us permanently as a culture.”
― Vivian Gornick, The End of The Novel of Love

“Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers”
― Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

“It remains, as ever, an axiom of conventional wisdom that the use of propaganda as a means of social and ideological control is distinctive of totalitarian regimes. Yet the most minimal exercise of common sense would suggest a different view: that propaganda is likely to play at least as important a part in democratic societies (where the existing distribution of power and privilege is vulnerable to quite limited changes in popular opinion) as in authoritarian societies (where it is not). It is arguable that the success of business propaganda in persuading us, for so long, that we are free from propaganda is one of the most significant propaganda achievements of the twentieth century.”
― Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy: Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty