John Henrik Clarke Quotes

Children were pack animals; let any one of them act different from the group, and the rest would bring him down.

fair play is less characteristic of groups than of individuals.

The market turns out to be just one special case of collective decision-making.

Men, who are rogues individually, are in the mass very honorable people.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Mankind have always wandered or settled, agreed, or quarreled in troops and companies.

Society becomes how we behave.

Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school.

Society is not a mere sum of individuals. Rather, the system formed by their association represents a specific reality which has its own characteristics... The group thinks, feels, and acts quite differently from the way in which its members would were they isolated. If, then, we begin with the individual, we shall be able to understand nothing of what takes place in the group.

To be part of a family, or any community, is to have duties and responsibility, to be bound by the rules of that group.

They travel best in gangs, hanging around like clumps of bananas, thick skinned and yellow.

The evils of mankind are caused, not by the primary aggressiveness of individuals, but by their self-transcending identification with groups whose common denominator is low intelligence and high emotionality.

There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

We do good by ourselves, but we seldom do wrong alone.

They travel in groups. You never see an Asian by their self.

The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.

I think when there's so much information to be eaten up, and so many ways to do it, people cling to groups. I think we, as monkeys, want to live in smaller groups.

Men are competent in groups that mimic the playground, incompetent in groups that mimic the family

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.

As for academics, I do not see why their responsibilities as moral agents should differ in principle from the responsibilities of others; in particular, others who also enjoy a degree of privilege and power, and therefore have the responsibilities that are conferred by those advantages.

I think that we, as monkeys, want to live in smaller groups. It's very scary when we're all - as wonderful as it is - connected.

You cannot change any society unless you take responsibility for it, unless you see yourself as belonging to it and responsible for changing it.

Put together all the existing families and you have society. It is as simple as that. Whatever kind of training took place in the individual family will be reflected in the kind of society that these families create.

Every group feels strong once it has found a scapegoat.

I've probably overused this analogy of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight, but, in reality, it's so simple, real time communication of individuals that allow for this super organism type of organism to happen.