Rajneesh Quotes

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

Once the herd starts moving in one direction, it's very hard to turn it, even slightly.

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind legs. But by standing a flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men.

… 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…

Many of those engaged in a lemming-like march to the sea are proud of their individualism.

Our desire to conform is greater than our respect for objective facts.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

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

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

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

You see something happen to a population whereby everyone adopts something that's just preposterous in a way that makes it normal instantly. If any one person prior to the rash of puka shells, for example, was seen wearing puka shells, he would look like an idiot. But when everyone is wearing them, it instantly makes them normal.

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

The multitude is always in the wrong.

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.

I always look at everyone when we're on the street and think, 'We're like sheep or ants.'

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

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.

If all those around you believe some particular thing, you will soon be tempted to share in that belief.

The crowd is not us. It never is.

Failing conventionally is the route to go; as a group, lemmings may have a rotten image, but no individual lemming has ever received bad press

It's much better to say, "If the herd is running, I'm running with those guys." And humans have herd mentality.

We're all sheep and lemmings to some degree.