Patrick Ness Quotes

The mob begins to think and reason. Poor reptiles!

Wherever there is a crowd there is untruth.

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.

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.

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

… 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…

Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable - as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead.

Fortuna likes to find a crowd and follow it.

Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.

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

The intelligence of the creature known as a crowd, is the square root of the number of people in it.

Let one persuade many, and he becomes confirmed and convinced, and cares for no better evidence.

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

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

Here is a man with the greatest intellect in Europe, and yet he debases it by simply following majorities and the crowd.

In wartime the herd instinct rise …

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.

One cannot be independent of the deep thinking of the people.

I started wondering why it is that people line up behind charismatic leaders. It's easy to understand the emergence of a figure who's narcissistic and compelling. But why people follow this person mindlessly - that was the hard question to me.

A crowd is always impressed by the sum of its own number.

When the audience reacts all together, it's genius. The audience is its own being in a way. It's a weird, amorphous beast that is also somehow a golden emperor that is also somehow every adult you've ever come across in your life who doesn't approve of you - all in one place.

The masses are always wrong...Wisdom is doing everything the crowd does not do. All you do is reverse the totality of their learning and you have the heaven they're looking for.

It is a stupid presumption to go about despising and condemning as false anything that seems to us improbable; this is a common fault in those who think they have more intelligence than the crowd.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

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