Bertrand Russell Quotes

Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

You learn more about a person from the people around that person than you do from the person themselves. We all have our own ideas of who we are that may or may not be justified, and you can really find out a heck of a lot more accurately from the people around an individual.

Desire and force between them are responsible for all our actions; desire causes our voluntary acts, force our involuntary.

When like-minded people deliberate as an organized group, the general opinion shifts towards extreme versions of their common beliefs.

I've always been interested in social psychology and why certain groups of people do things while others don't.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

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.

People are dynamic. They change, and soon as there are enough of you, things change [for a whole society].

Men believe themselves to be free, simply because they are conscious of their actions, and unconscious of the causes whereby those actions are determined.

In any group of people, no matter how hard-assed they might appear, there’s always a geek.

If you could stand back far enough and watch the whole process you'd see you are a totally determined being.

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

no one in a group of three is the same person he (she, it) is in a group of two. No more than he is the same in a group of two as he is alone.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

We live what we know. If we believe the universe and ourselves to be mechanical, we will live mechanically.

The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself. … The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader.

All behavior involves conscious or unconscious selection of particular actions out of all those which are physically possible to the actor and to those persons over whom he exercises influence and authority.

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord on the strength of a resolution taken once and for all. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.

The social sciences are usually concerned with groups of persons rather than individual persons. The behavior of individuals, being free, is unpredictable.

But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.

we should think not only of what the leader does to the group, but also of what the group does to the leader.

The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.

Groups tend to be more extreme than individuals.

The illusion of self-awareness. Happy automatons, running on trivial programs. I'll bet you never guess. From the inside, how can you?