Thomas Hobbes Quotes

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

A crowd is an elemental thing. A word, a glance, and a crowd becomes a mob.

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

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

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

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

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

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

The mob shouts with one big mouth and eats with a thousand little ones.

… 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.

I detest audiences. Not in their individual components but en masse... I think they are a force of evil.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

Nothing is so uncertain or unpredictable as the feelings of a crowd.

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

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

Every numerous assembly is a mob; everything there depends on instantaneous turns.

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.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

Masses are always breeding grounds of psychic epidemics.

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.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

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.