Herd Instinct Quotes

Politics is a herd mentality. Politicians don't really lead. Politicians reflect what they think is consensus opinion.

War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense.

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

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

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

Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.

The herd instinct among forecasters makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

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.

The majority cannot reason; it has no judgement. It has always placed its destiny in the hands of others; it has followed its leaders even into destruction. The mass has always opposed, condemned, and hounded the innovator, the pioneer of a new truth.

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

Mankind are a herd of knaves and fools. It is necessary to join the crowd, or get out of their way, in order not to be trampled to death by them.

The character of the crowds is made up of mimicry and hostility.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

Children can be the most cruel creatures alive. They have the herd instinct of prejudice against any outsider, and they are merciless in its indulgence.

One might expect, perhaps, that a man full of genius could pasture in the greatness of his own thoughts, and renounce the cheap approbation of the crowd which he despises; yet he succumbs to the more powerful impulse of the herd instinct. His searching and his finding, his call, belong to the herd.

A pernicious error is, that multitude is divine because it is multitude.

A man is capable of thought. A crowd is not.

… 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…

In wartime the herd instinct rise …

Crowd action is the outcome of agreement based on concurrence of emotion rather than of thought.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

The flock gets sight of a spot of blood on some chicken and they all go to peckin' at it, see, till they rip the chicken to shreds, blood and bones and feathers. But usually a couple of the flock gets spotted in the fracas, then it's their turn. And a few more gets spots and gets pecked to death, and more and more. Oh, a peckin' party can wipe out the whole flock in a matter of a few hours, buddy, I seen it. A mighty awesome sight. The only way to prevent it—with chickens—is to clip blinders on them. So's they can't see.