John Calvin Quotes

Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.

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

The masses, the public, is too strict.

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.

Arguments are extremely vulgar, for everyone in good society holds exactly the same opinion.

Better be wrong with the many than right with the few.

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.

When the people have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.

When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

What is social proof? Put simply, it's the positive influence created when someone finds out that others are doing something. It's also known as informational social influence.

The voice of authority speaks not for the one but for the many; authority figures have a strong and rapid effect on social norms in part because they change our assumptions about what other people think.

Online, you're trying to appeal to everyone and people who you don't know at the same time. So I think, as a side effect, it amplifies the desire for groupthink.

Recall that people like to do what most people think it is right to do; recall too that people like to do what most people actually do.

There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be brought to the conviction that it is generally adopted.

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Just because so many conforming kids wake up every morning asking, 'What is everybody else going to wear today?' doesn't mean that they don't wish it were different. Peer pressure is just that: pressure.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

Society is a republic. When an individual tries to lift themselves above others, they are dragged down by the mass, either by ridicule or slander.

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

A fashionable milieu is one in which everybody's opinion is made up of the opinion of all the others. Has everybody a different opinion? Then it is a literary milieu.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Nothing is more obstinate than a fashionable consensus.

A lot of people believe what other people say.

Most people live their life around what other people do.