Group Behavior Quotes

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

Humans are the only animals who will follow unstable pack leaders.

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

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.

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.

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

I would hate for people to generalize about every Haitian from something that one Haitian did, or a group of Haitians did.

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

No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.

One thing about a pig. He thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

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

I think I'm becoming a psychologist in explaining the Republican Party. It's the only way you can explain 'em. It's psychological.

The extreme self-sacrifice characteristic of group-selected species such as ants and bees can often be found among soldiers.

Everybody is looking at everybody else a foolish crowd walking on mirrors.

To understand how people organize social systems, we have to discover the principles that we create to make some societies intelligible.

I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

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.

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

Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behaviour of the whole, this is progress.

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

Your people, sir, is nothing but a great beast!

A social fact is every way of acting, fixed or not, capable of exercising on the individual an external constraint; or again, every way of acting which is general throughout a given society, while at the same time existing in its own right independent of its individual manifestations.