1- Propaganda means agitation. Elaborating upon Lenin's pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Marxist Georgy Plekhanov defined propaganda as the use of slogans, parables, and half-truths to exploit the grievances of the uneducated and the unreasonable. He regarded both strategies as absolutely essential to political victory and twinned them in the term agitprop.
2- This is how Joseph Goebbels (Hitler's minister of Propaganda) puts it:
Political propaganda in principle is active and revolutionary. It is aimed at the broad masses. It speaks the language of the people because it wants to be understood by the people. Its task is the highest creative art of putting sometimes complicated events and facts in a way simple enough to be understood by the man on the street.3- Propaganda tries to manipulate people's beliefs, attitudes, or actions by means of symbols: Words, gestures, banners, monuments, music, clothing, insignia, hairstyles, designs on coins and postage stamps, and so forth.
4- Contemporary propaganda uses social-scientific research facilities to conduct opinion surveys and psychological interviews in efforts to learn the symbolic meanings of its message.