Jaron Lanier Quotes

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.

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

I think better of our behaviour as individuals than I do when we see ourselves as members of a group. It's when people start forming groups that we have to watch our backs.

... there is a particular propensity in the world for people, wherever they appear in great numbers, to permit themselves collectively everything that would be forbidden them individually.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

An audience can be like a pack of wolves.

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…

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

When we find ourselves in groups or with charismatic individuals, we might do things we wouldn't ordinarily do.

Money often moves around like a high school kid with no personality - it goes with the crowd.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

The character of the crowds is made up of mimicry and hostility.

People are so constituted that everybody would rather undertake what they see others do, whether they have an aptitude for it or not.

Men go crazy in congregation. They only get better one by one.

The mob rushes in where individuals fear to tread.

Herd pressure is to be judged by two things: first, its intensity, and second, its direction.

Conformity is inevitable when folks huddle together in rebellion.

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.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

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.

When we were growing up, all of us kids were vegetarians. No one had asked me to stop eating meat - I just noticed everyone else around me had stopped, so I followed the crew.