Charles Dickens Quotes

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

An audience can become a mob very easily.

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

After a certain point is reached the numbers cease to matter, and all that remains is the faceless mass of a crowd.

I think horror should never be safe, whether it's violent or non violent.

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

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.

Terrorists destroy randomly.

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

Horror fiction shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.

The audience is a very curious animal. It is shrewd rather than intelligent. Its mental capacity is less than that of its most intellectual members.

All the ways of this world are as fickle and unstable as a sudden storm at sea.

I think of people as members of an audience. But an audience acts independently of every individual. It's an organism on its own. I focus on that living hydra in the dark.

Emphasizing the crowd means de-emphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad, mob-like behaviors.

The bigger the crowd, the more negligible the individual.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters.

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

The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.

As soon as you put men together, they somehow sink, corporatively, below the level of the worst of the individuals composing it. Collect scholars on a club committee, or men of science on a jury; all their virtues vanish, and their vices pop out, reinforced by the self-confidence which the power of numbers is bound to bestow.

[I]t may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering.

No one knows what's next, but everybody does it.

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

It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite… The reversal of fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest

A crowd is an elemental thing. A word, a glance, and a crowd becomes a mob.