Thomas Jefferson: The most effectual engines for pacifying a nation are the public papers A despotic government always keeps a kind of standing army of news-writers who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, invent and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote7956