Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again? I missed something.

Autocracy is based on the assumption that one man is wiser than a million men. Let's play that over again, too. Who decides?

- Heinlein, "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"

It is an enormous mistake to believe that if you see something a thousand times on Google that this has ANYTHING to do with its accuracy. Anybody can find crap on Google. The real work is the filtering.

For example, I went back about an hour ago out of curiosity and looked up more info on the "Goebbels quote" Lindy tossed out on another post, something I'd looked up in another forum a long time ago. While the quote is mentioned many times, in many places, as far as I had knew, not one place has actually sourced it to any particular speech, biography, or historical note, and I wanted to double-check that. While researching it, I found that the Nazis, in fact, normally mentioned the "Big Lie" in speeches as an attack on their enemies' tactics, not as something they, in their mantle of "virtue," would ever do. None of them ever publicly raised this up in speeches or writing as an approved technique of their own, although obviously they did, in fact, use "the Big Lie" often in actual practice.

Goebbels (again, in what he said for the benefit of his audience, not what he did in practice) said this on propaganda:

All propaganda has a direction. The quality of this direction determines whether propaganda has a positive or negative effect. Good propaganda does not need to lie, indeed it may not lie. It has no reason to fear the truth. It is a mistake to believe that the people cannot take the truth. They can. It is only a matter of presenting the truth to people in a way that they will be able to understand. A propaganda that lies proves that it has a bad cause. It cannot be successful in the long run. A good propaganda will always come along that serves a good cause. But propaganda is still necessary if a good cause is to succeed. A good idea does not win simply because it is good. It must be presented properly if it is to win. The combination makes for the best propaganda. Such propaganda is successful without being obnoxious. It depends on its nature, not its methods. It works without being noticed. Its goals are inherent in its nature. Since it is almost invisible, it is effective and powerful. A good cause will lose to a bad one if it depends only on its rightness, while the other side uses the methods of influencing the masses. We are, for example, firmly convinced that we fought the war for a good cause, but that was not enough. The world should also have known and seen that our cause was good. However, we lacked the effective means of mass propaganda to make that clear to the world. Marxism certainly did not fight for great ideals. Despite that, in November 1918 it overcame Kaiser, Reich, and the army because it was superior in the art of mass propaganda.

It seems unlikely to me that the quote so often attributed to Goebbels:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

...is something such a self-serving person, so blindly convinced of his own virtue, would say anywhere, even in private. A creature like Goebbels, like any true fanatic, would honestly believe in the rightness of his cause, and it's highly unlikely he would brag about his philosophy being a lie. In other words, if consistency and psychology are taken into account, Goebbels would not say something about truth being the enemy of his policies, since he would, like any megalomaniac, believe his policies WERE always unerring truth.

So I called bullshit on the quote, and pointed out the irony of it appearing in a post about hearing something often enough to make it "true."