Laurell K. Hamilton Quotes

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

There is nothing more dangerous than debate in a crowd.

Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: It is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them.

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

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

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

… 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…

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

Nothing is so uncertain or unpredictable as the feelings of a crowd.

Every numerous assembly is a mob; everything there depends on instantaneous turns.

Fortuna likes to find a crowd and follow it.

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

The psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual

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

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.

I'm afraid Japanese people tend to collective hysteria.

I'm very wary of large groups of people getting together and trying to believe the same thing. It never seems to end well, whether it's political or religious or whatever.

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

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

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

As soon as a certain number of living beings are gathered together ... they place themselves instinctively under the authority of a chief. In the case of human crowds the chief is often nothing more than a ringleader or agitator, but as such he plays a considerable part.

The public is a ferocious beast: one must chain it up or flee from it.

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

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.