Emil Cioran Quotes

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

I believe people think as a group more often than we might realize or care to admit. We like to believe that we act as individuals and nothing more, but time and again - in corporations and business, in politics and religion, in fashion and culture, and in friendships and social circles - we think and do as one.

What I've discovered is that from football fans to undertakers, secret agents to marble-players and politicians, we all are part of at least one tribe. By tribes, I'm talking anthropologically; these groups are determined less by genes and more by the work they do or the passions they pursue.

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.

One of the things I wanted to introduce in The Same Sea beyond transcending the conflict, is the fact that deep down below all our secrets are the same.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.

You as an audience can look at these things as films, but I remember them as social experiences.

Communities don't think, don't believe, don't want, don't have needs, don't have interests and don't make decisions. Only individuals have minds that generate desires and needs - and only individuals can make choices and decisions.

Our humanity rests upon a series of learned behaviors, woven together into patterns that are infinitely fragile and never directly inherited.

It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case.

For traditional societies … the collective, the group, is more important than the individual, and empowering the individual is equated with dividing the society.

… 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…

No experience exists unless it's a shared one.

It is important to recognize that folklore is not simply a way of obtaining available date about identity for social scientists; it is actually one of the principal means by which an individual and a group discovers or establishes his or its identity.

Everyone has images in their mind of what to expect from different groups.

When I grew up, there was a monoculture. Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience.

The three of us being brought up, even though we didn't know each other in our early lives, on the same type of music, same type of environment, there's a lot of sameness there. It's three peas in a pod, if they'll fit.

If a joke makes our tribe laugh, we assume it will make other friend-tribes laugh.

Myth-making is absolutely necessary to create the simplified images that people live off.