Cato the Elder Quotes

Majorities without discipline are not majorities.

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.

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

Deliberation is the work of many men. Action of one alone.

On 'Sound of My Voice,' I was the first and last word, which is kind of a dictatorship. I like collectives, though.

The crowd has a way of being right.

The only kind of coercion I recommend is mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.

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

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

You can't run a government from one single person. What instead matters is that leadership be about gathering around extraordinary individuals and getting the best out of them.

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

The chairman of a committee should be in harmony with the majority who constitute it.

A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.

In all legislative assemblies, the greater the number composing them may be, the fewer will be the men who will in fact direct their proceedings.

The influence of every mode of thinking which is shared by numbers ought to be felt in the legislature.

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.

We assemble parliaments and councils, to have the benefit of their collected wisdom; but we necessarily have, at the same time, the inconvenience of their collected passions, prejudices and private interests.

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

The patrol system leads each boy to see that he has some individual responsibility for the good of his patrol.

Droplets, droplets: We are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path. ... He has tipped us over, all of us in our teetering expectancy, and now we are pouring toward him, coursing on a wave of sound, of roaring shouts and applause. ... They are the moon; we are a tide, their tide, and under their direction we will wipe clean all the sickness and blight from the world.

It is astonishing how foolish humans can be in groups, especially when they follow their leader without question.

I think herd mentality is a good thing overall. Because if every sheep had to figure out the velocity of the wolf and their personal risk, that would take forever.

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

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.