Top 60 Edward L. Bernays Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

— Edward L. Bernays

2. “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”

— Edward L. Bernays

3. “When I came back to the United States, I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace. And “propaganda” got to be a bad word because of the Germans using it, so what I did was to try and find some other words so we found the words “public relations”.”

— Edward L. Bernays

4. “People want to go where they wanted to be led.”

— Edward L. Bernays

5. “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.”

— Edward L. Bernays

6. “The only difference between ‘propaganda’ and ‘education,’ really, is in the point of view. The advocacy of what we believe in is education. The advocacy of what we don’t believe in is propaganda.”

— Edward L. Bernays

7. “We are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

— Edward L. Bernays

8. “We govern what the public think about.”

— Edward L. Bernays

9. “There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.”

— Edward L. Bernays

10. “In the ethical sense, propaganda bears the same relation to education as to business or politics. It may be abused. It may be used to over-advertise an institution and to create in the public mind artificial values. There can be no absolute guarantee against its misuse.”

— Edward L. Bernays

11. “It is sometimes possible to change the attitudes of millions but impossible to change the attitude of one man.”

— Edward L. Bernays

12. “If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway.”

— Edward L. Bernays

13. “In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power.”

— Edward L. Bernays

14. “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process, the freedom to persuade and suggest.”

— Edward L. Bernays

15. “The best defense against propaganda: more propaganda.”

— Edward L. Bernays

16. “Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.”

— Edward L. Bernays

17. “Any person or organization depends ultimately on public approval, and is therefore faced with the problem of engineering the public’s consent to a program or goal.”

— Edward L. Bernays

18. “Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.”

— Edward L. Bernays

19. “The best place to find things: the public library.”

— Edward L. Bernays

20. “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. 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.”

— Edward L. Bernays

21. “As civilization has become more complex, and as the need for invisible government has been increasingly demonstrated, the technical means have been invented and developed by which opinion may be regimented.”

— Edward L. Bernays

22. “I believe that competition in the future will not be only an advertising competition between individual products or between big associations, but that it will in addition be a competition of propaganda.”

— Edward L. Bernays

23. “Propaganda will never die out. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help to bring order out of chaos.”

— Edward L. Bernays

24. “The systematic study of mass psychology revealed to students the potentialities of invisible government of society by manipulation of the motives which actuate man in the group.”

— Edward L. Bernays

25. “Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.”

— Edward L. Bernays

26. “The great enemy of any attempt to change men’s habits is inertia. Civilization is limited by intertia.”

— Edward L. Bernays

27. “The three main elements of public relations are practically as old as society: informing people, persuading people, or integrating people with people. Of course, the means and methods of accomplishing these ends have changed as society has changed.”

— Edward L. Bernays

28. “The public is not cognizant of the real value of education, and does not realize that education as a social force is not receiving the kind of attention it has the right to expect in a democracy.”

— Edward L. Bernays

29. “For the same reason I read the National Geographic, I like to see places I will never visit.”

— Edward L. Bernays

30. “Now “public opinion” stood out as a force that must be managed, and not through clever guesswork but by experts trained to do that all-important job.”

— Edward L. Bernays

31. “The normal school should provide for the training of the educator to make him realize that his is a twofold job: education as a teacher and education as a propagandist.”

— Edward L. Bernays

32. “The public relations counsel must deal with the fact that persons who have little knowledge of a subject almost invariably form definite and positive judgments upon that subject.”

— Edward L. Bernays

33. “Small groups of persons can, and do, make the rest of us think what they please about a given subject. But there are usually proponents and opponents of every propaganda, both of whom are equally eager to convince the majority.”

— Edward L. Bernays

34. “People accept the facts which come to them through existing channels. They like to hear new things in accustomed ways. They have neither the time nor the inclination to search for facts that are not readily available to them.”

— Edward L. Bernays

35. “That propaganda easily seduces even those whom it most horrifies is a paradox that Bernays grasped completely; and it is one that we must try at last to understand, if we want to change the world that Edward Bernays, among others, made for us.”

— Edward L. Bernays

36. “In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, and emotions.”

— Edward L. Bernays

37. “It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice.”

— Edward L. Bernays

38. “Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time.”

— Edward L. Bernays

39. “Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.”

— Edward L. Bernays

40. “The myth of the detached manipulator and compliant crowd has, since the Twenties, also been abundantly re-echoed by academic students of mass suasion.”

— Edward L. Bernays

41. “No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership. If.”

— Edward L. Bernays

42. “In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered to him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed.”

— Edward L. Bernays

43. “Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda.”

— Edward L. Bernays

44. “The great political problem in our modern democracy is how to induce our leaders to lead.”

— Edward L. Bernays

45. “Modern business must have its finger continuously on the public pulse. It must understand the changes in the public mind and be prepared to interpret itself fairly and eloquently to changing opinion.”

— Edward L. Bernays

46. “Continuous interpretation is achieved by trying to control every approach to the public mind in such a manner that the public receives the desired impression, often without being conscious of it. High-spotting, on the other hand, vividly seizes the attention of the public and fixes it upon some detail or aspect which is typical of the entire enterprise.”

— Edward L. Bernays

47. “It is obvious that politics would gain much in prestige if the money-raising campaign were conducted candidly and publicly, like the campaigns for the war funds. Charity drives might be made excellent models for political funds drives. The elimination of the little black bag element in politics would raise the entire prestige of politics in America, and the public interest would be infinitely greater if the actual participation occurred earlier and more constructively in the campaign.”

— Edward L. Bernays

48. “This is an age of mass production. In the mass production of materials a broad technique has been developed and applied to their distribution. In this age, too, there must be a technique for the mass distribution of ideas.”

— Edward L. Bernays

49. “Here was an extraordinary state accomplishment: mass enthusiasm at the prospect of a global brawl that otherwise would mystify those very masses, and that shattered most of those who actually took part in it. The Anglo-American drive to demonize “the Hun,” and to cast the war as a transcendent clash between Atlantic “civilization” and Prussian “barbarism,” made so powerful an impression on so many that the worlds of government and business were forever changed.”

— Edward L. Bernays

50. “It is a sort of managerial aristocracy that quietly determines what we buy and how we vote and what we deem as good or bad. “They govern us,” the author writes, “by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.”

— Edward L. Bernays