Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

The crowd has a way of being right.

The ultimate trick is to convince, persuade. Every single person out there is an idiot, but collectively they're a genius.

...people are by nature fickle, and it is easy to persuade them of something, but difficult to keep them persuaded.

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

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

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

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.

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

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

So you [Romans] when you have got together in a body, let yourselves be guided by those whom singly you would never think of being advised by.

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.

… 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…

In cities men cannot be prevented from concerting together, and from awakening a mutual excitement which prompts sudden and passionate resolutions. Cities may be looked upon as large assemblies, of which all the inhabitants are members; their populace exercises a prodigious influence upon the magistrates, and frequently executes its own wishes without their intervention.

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 human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

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

The public, therefore, among a democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by a sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

You count snouts,” Straha said. “Whichever side can persuade most snouts to join it prevails. It does not have to be clever. It does not have to be wise. It only needs to be popular.

In crowds it is stupidity and not mother wit that is accumulated.

And the crowd often betrayed the people

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire.

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

For the mob is always impressed by appearances and by results, and the world is composed of the mob.

To whom should propaganda be addressed? To the scientifically trained intelligentsia or the less educated masses? It must be addressed always and exclusively to the masses.