Collective Behavior Quotes

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

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

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.

How powerful social mores are! Only a spider's web lies across the volcano, yet it refrains from erupting.

The people would be just as noisy if they were going to see me hanged.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is--a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.

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

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.

Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.

'Crowd folly', the tendency of humans, under some circumstances, to resemble lemmings, explains much foolish thinking of brilliant men and much foolish behavior - like investment management practices of many foundations represented here today. It is sad that today each institutional investor apparently fears most of all that its investment practices will be different from practices of the rest of the crowd.

No nation can last which has made a mob of itself, however generous at heart.

There is no telling to what extremes of cruelty and ruthlessness a man will go when he is freed from the fears, hesitations, doubts and the vague stirrings of decency that go with individual judgement. When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom- freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement

Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

He appears mad indeed but to a few, because the majority is infected with the same disease.

If you want to get each individual's honest opinion, you don't want that opinion to be influenced by others who are present, much less allow a group to coordinate what they are going to say.

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

There is nothing more dangerous than debate in a crowd.

My favorite Asimov works were the 'Foundation' books because the concept, at the time, was crazy, but psycho-history has now turned out to be an actual real thing. You can predict the actions of large groups of people once you understand, for lack of a better way to put it, their way of existing and their prejudices.

Science of Society

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than mob carried away by the novelty of power.

Man is a social animal formed to please in society.

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