Mass Perception Quotes

If you wish the sympathy of broad masses then you must tell them the crudest and most stupid things.

What the multitude says is so, or soon will be.

Life provides material for its agitation which makes its general views comprehensible to the masses.

Public opinion is a mysterious and invisible power, to which everything must yield. There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful; yet capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine.

The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.

The instinct of the people is right.

All becomes easy when we follow the current of opinion; it is the ruler of the world.

Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd suppose.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

Private opinion is weak, but public opinion is almost omnipotent.

It may be that 'the voice of the people is the voice of God' in fifty one cases out of a hundred, but in the remaining forty nine it is quite as likely to be the voice of the devil, of, what is still worse, the voice of a fool.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

All the people I talk to, increasingly, can see that the emperor has got no clothes. The case for leaving [the EU] is now overwhelming.

What is public opinion? It is private indolence.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities...

The 'public' is a phantom, the phantom of an opinion supposed to exist in a vast number of persons who have no effective interrelation and though the opinion is not effectively present in the units. Such an opinion is spoken of as 'public opinion,' a fiction which is appealed to by individuals and by groups as supporting their special views. It is impalpable, illusory, transient; "'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone"; a nullity which can nevertheless for a moment endow the multitude with power to uplift or destroy.

What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.

The public is wiser than the wisest critic.

The task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses' field of vision.

And that which yesterday was the novel opinion of one man, to-day becomes the general opinion of the majority.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

[Radical leftist] are never been a majority. We just fell for one of the greatest illusions in modern politics.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.