The campaigns for President of the United States in the last two years has highlighted, for me, the truth of what Adolf Hitler wrote about the use of propaganda. I present here some selected quotes from Mein Kampf, which are just as true now as they were when the book was written.

“The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands…”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 180-181.

“In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 173

“All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 180

“But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 184

“It is a mistake to make propaganda many-sided, like scientific instruction, for instance… As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 180-181

“[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, Mein Kampf, pp. 180

“[Propaganda] does not have multiple shadings; it has a positive and a negative; love or hate, right or wrong, truth or lie, never half this way and half that way…”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 183

“[This is the] very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of propaganda: a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with…”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 182

“The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective [propaganda] will be.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 180

“For I must not measure the speech of a statesman to his people by the impression which it leaves in a university professor, but by the effect it exerts on the people. And this alone gives the standard for the speaker’s genius.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 477

“The purpose of propaganda is not to provide interesting distraction for blasé young gentlemen, but to convince… the masses. But the masses are slow moving, and they always require a certain time before they are ready even to notice a thing, and only after the simplest ideas are repeated thousands of times will the masses finally remember them.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 185

“When there is change, it must not alter the content of what propaganda is driving at, but in the end must always say the same thing. For instance, a slogan must be presented from different angles, but the end of all remarks must always and immutably be the slogan itself. Only in this way can the propaganda have a unified and complete effect.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 185

“To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 179

“As soon as one point is removed from the sphere of dogmatic certainty, the discussion may not simply result in a new and better formulation, but may easily lead to endless debates and general confusion.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“I have already stated… that all great, world-shaking events have been brought about, not by written matter, but by the spoken word… While the speaker gets a continuous correction of his speech from the crowd he is addressing, since he can always see in the faces of his listeners to what they extent they follow his arguments with understanding and whether the impression and the effect of his words lead to the desired goal — the writer does not know his readers at all. The essential point… is that a piece of literature never knows into what hands it will fall, and yet must retain its definite form.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 469-70