William Rounseville Alger Quotes

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

The mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile.

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

The multitude is always in the wrong.

A pernicious error is, that multitude is divine because it is multitude.

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.

The advantage of being a leftist has always been that it's easy. You don't have to think, you just need to feel. You don't need to reason, engage in inquiry, or study. You just need to have emotions and express them.

It's so easy for folks to normalize their opinions, to engage in a groupthink that is damaging.

Crowds create illusions.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

I always find myself very distrustful of intense crowd phenomena, and I think those are things that we should always try to question, especially critically.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

The great enemy of reason, virtue and religion, the Multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity.

Emotion is a rotten base for politics.

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together ... they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief. In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

An audience can become a mob very easily.