"We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them"
About this Quote
The subtext is darker than elitism. “Anything can be said” isn’t about harmless fluff; it’s about a permission structure. Once institutions decide the public won’t check, remember, or connect dots, truth becomes optional and rhetoric becomes a replacement for reality. The sentence’s blunt construction mirrors the bluntness of the strategy: the causality is clean, almost bureaucratic. Assumption -> culture -> impunity.
Context matters here: Vizinczey is a writer shaped by political upheaval and the long afterlife of propaganda. He knows that mass persuasion isn’t just a marketing sin; it can be a civic catastrophe. Read in a contemporary key, the quote anticipates the attention economy’s incentives: talk louder than you inform, provoke rather than explain, flatten complexity into slogans because complexity takes time and time doesn’t scale.
What makes the line work is its refusal to romanticize the audience. It implicates systems, but it also dares readers to reject the role assigned to them: passive consumers of whatever “can be said.”
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Vizinczey, Stephen. (2026, January 16). We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-now-have-a-whole-culture-based-on-the-126992/
Chicago Style
Vizinczey, Stephen. "We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-now-have-a-whole-culture-based-on-the-126992/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We now have a whole culture based on the assumption that people know nothing and so anything can be said to them." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-now-have-a-whole-culture-based-on-the-126992/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.









